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Hair Care Tips

The Major Salons are now Putting out Salon Quality Coloring Kits for Use at Home.

You’ll get to see this at any major hair salon across the country these days -  their owners, or trusted assistants, go out all the time researching drugstore and department store cosmetics shelves, for home hair color and touchup kits, that they can pick for their clients. So what gives? These are customers who pay anywhere between dollarsignr300-dollarsignr500 for a sitting to get a hair tint. Why would they want all of a sudden, to do it themselves, and how do they get their salons to do their shopping for them? It’s just that, the dollarsignr300 tab gets to be a little too much in this economy, even for the high-paying customers.

If the salons insist on charging that much for every single sitting, even if it is to just do a little touch-up work around the roots, those customers are just going to leave altogether. So instead, in recognition of the tough time everyone is going through, salons go and buy them DIY touchup kits to use between settings. That way, they can get professional service for the major hair work, and save money doing the minor work themselves. The hair salon people give their best customers a little primer on how best to hold the brush, or shampoo themselves – just a few hair care tips to help them at home.

Like many things, home cooking, home washing, that usually get a little bit of a boost during a recession, home hair care is something that has gotten a 20% rise. Women who would previously get all their work done at a professional salon, have switched to getting some done at home. The major expensive salons never used to use consumer brands like L’Oreal or Clairol for their coloring work. They always used specialty in-house preparations, or worked with niche manufacturers.

But with the customers’money now all going to the mass-market products, expensive salons are beginning to reconsider their strategy. It’s like Starbucks offering you coffee powder to brew at home. When a specialty dealer offers you a brew-your own-product, you imagine that you’re somehow going to be able to get professional results right at home. There is a definite market for that kind of thing, and a premium to charge of customers too. Searching on the Internet at any hair care tips website, you’ll see them raving about Umberto Savone and Frederic Fekkai products from LA and NY – major salons that have put out hair care products to sell at department stores.

People tend to forget after having been able to afford professional coloring for ages, what it was that first turned them to the professionals all those years ago. You just read up on hair care tips, and coloring advice, don the latex gloves and get going yourself. You can’t quite get the right shade, it isn’t uniform, your hair looks and feels like straw saturated with great color, and everything sticks together in one clump. But even the professionals don’t recommend using home kits for anything other than touchups. Going the whole nine yards and doing it all yourself at home, can only bring back the bad old days home hair coloring.

Signs of Teething

Though there are a rare, few babies born with a few teeth in their mouth, almost all babies are born toothless. They are going to go through what is called teething during their first few years of life -starting around four to six months of age. The very early signs of teething can be confusing. Once the first tooth has come through, most parents then know what their baby is going to do when they have tooth pain. There are some signs that most associate with teething, but each baby is going to have different signs and are going to act differently to the pain that comes with teething.

One of the most common signs of teething is excessive drooling. All babies start drooling at some point because this is what the body does to aid in digestion. Babies often lack the control to swallow saliva so it comes out of the mouth. It is common to see babies with wet lips and chins whether they are teething or not.

However, excessive drool can be on of the very first signs that teething is about to begin. Make sure you gently wipe or dab away drool as often as you can, as it can cause a rash on baby’s sensitive skin.
Drooling alone does not mean a child is teething though. There are other signs of teething that you are going to notice. If you suspect teething, see if you can get a good look at the gums, which can be hard with a baby. Most babies get the front bottom teeth first, so look there first. Some can get the top ones first, and even other teeth, but the bottom front are the most common first teeth. See if you notice a bump, redness, or even the tooth ready to poke through the gum.

Pain almost always accompanies teething. The front teeth hurt, and baby is going to bite down if you stick a finger in their mouth. To check for this most telling of the signs of teething, wash your hands and lightly put a finger on the gum. If they bite down and gnaw on your finger, a tooth could be getting ready to erupt. The pressure helps the the pain. You may also notice they seem to be chewing when they have nothing in the mouth. That helps with the pain too.

The signs of teething are going to come and go. The teeth in the front are going to hurt less than molars, as they have less surface space to break through the gum, and they are more sharp in shape. At times, Tylenol may help when you know teething has started and baby is in pain, but always talk with your pediatrician before giving it for this reason.

Look for other natural remedies for teething as well and save the medication for when the pain seems to be at its worst. Chewing can help but remember to only give baby things that they can not choke on, and even when something should be safe, stay with baby while they use that item.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

What Antisocial Personality Disorder Is and Is Not.

Every year, I host a St. Patrick’s Day party that all of my friends and family members really enjoy. This past year, I was talking to one of my friends whose husband never comes to the party and I asked her if everything was all right. She said that everything was fine, that he just had antisocial personality disorder and had a difficult time being around a lot of people.

As a psychology major in college, I wanted to explain to her what I sincerely hoped was a misuse of the phrase antisocial personality disorder.

When most people say that another person is antisocial, they mean that the person prefers his own company. He would rather be by himself than around other people and pretty much avoids situations where he has to socialize. That seems to have become a fairly common term for more introverted and reclusive people, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, per se. However, there is a big difference in being antisocial in the common sense of the word and having antisocial personality disorder.
A person with antisocial personality disorder essentially has no regard for human life. He or she does not feel a sense of duty to conform to laws or social mores, and shows absolutely no remorse for the pain or harm he or she causes to others.
One of my professors gave an example of antisocial personality disorder one time as a man going into his workplace and shooting everyone there because he had a grudge against one employee. When asked why he shot at everyone in the room, he might respond by saying that he had to make sure he got his intended target.

If pressed further about all of the lives he has disrupted or destroyed, and the innocent people who had nothing to do with his grudge, he might respond by shrugging and saying they shouldn’t have been there. There is simply no regard or respect for other people with antisocial personality disorder.
I have to laugh sometimes, consequently, when someone will tell me that a friend or loved one is antisocial because they don’t do crowds. I am always tempted to say that they better hope he or she is not antisocial, or there could be a disastrous outcome.
Antisocial personality disorder is a serious, rare condition that should not be taken lightly. It is not the same as what many people refer to as being antisocial, and I think that it is important that a distinction is made between the two.

One is a serious mental health disorder that can potentially be dangerous, while the other is a character trait that most of us simply think of as being shy.

Cause of lung cancer

Smoking, the leading cause of lung cancer.

There are many diseases that are mysteries to us. Whether it’s the common cold, or influenza, or breast or testicular cancer, even the most common of diseases can flummox the medical establishment. Yes, we know how to treat some symptoms or remove some tumors, but we don’t know how the disease starts in the first place. And that’s an issue because preventative medicine is the best medicine – as your mom used to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

There’s no such mystery when it comes to sussing out the cause of lung cancer, however. Everyone from the youngest child to the elderly know that the number one cause of lung cancer is smoking. It’s simply the worst thing you can do for your body on a number of levels, and there’s no more obvious way than when seeing smoking as the leading cause of lung cancer.
And it’s important to understand that the cause of lung cancer in most Americans is smoking, and lung cancer causes more deaths in the united states than any other cancer. For both men and women.

In 2007 alone, more than one hundred sixty thousand people were projected to die in the United STates of lung cancer. To put it into context, that’s more than breast cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer combined.
And lung cancer is very deadly. If you’ve had it identified only after it’s spread to other parts of your body, then your chances of surviving at least five years are just two percent. If you’re diagnosed earlier, your chances of survival raise almost to fifty percent.
Compare that with testicular cancer, where even after it’s metasticized your survival rate is close to eighty five percent. If you’ve identified your testicular cancer before metasticization, the survival rate is nearly one hundred percent.
So there’s really no reason at all to continue smoking. Take it from me, a former smoker – I used to smoke a pack a day through high school, college and through to my mid-twenties. It was only after I really educated myself on the primary cause of lung cancer that I found the strength enough to quit. And now I’m working on six and a half years without buying a pack of smokes.

So do yourself a favor and quit smoking now, before it’s too late. And that’s the thing to remember: It’s never too late to quit smoking. Even if you have terminal lung cancer, your chances of surviving longer are increased if you quit smoking.

Aerobic Exercise

Learning to Love Aerobic Exercise.

In our health conscious society, everyone is working out. There are a multitude of programs designed to give you maximum results. However, nothing beats good old fashioned aerobic exercise to shed calories, pounds and inhibition. Aerobic exercise is fun, and healthy for you in a variety of ways. In addition, the wide variety of aerobic exercises available make it interesting and fun.

Aerobic exercise benefits your body and mind in a couple of ways. Initially, it will raise your heart rate. This jumps your metabolism, and can help you burn calories at an accelerated rate. Moreover, it helps to build lean muscle, especially in your legs. Certain types of aerobic exercise can also tone your core, if it requires balance. Finally, aerobic exercise is fantastic for clearing your mind. It allows you to focus and unwind all at once, relieving stress by producing endorphins, which gives you a mild feeling of euphoria.

How should one introduce aerobic exercise into their routine? The answer is slowly. Starting an intensive aerobic routine suddenly will cause major muscle pain, and exhaust you. If you are not an active person, start by introducing aerobic background activity into your daily routine. This can be as simple as taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or parking at the back of the parking lot. Once you can complete these tasks without being winded, start by walking on a daily basis for twenty or thirty minutes at a brisk pace.

There are other ways of practicing aerobic exercise that don’t involve walking or running, though. Riding your bike, dancing, swimming and playing certain sports also qualify. Have fun, and use variety to keep your exercise from becoming dull. If you have a gym membership, take advantage of the variety of aerobic machines you can exercise on. Aside from a treadmill or stationary bike, there are also elliptical machines, stairmasters, and gazelle machines that will work out your body in different ways while elevating your heart rate and making you sweat.

Aerobic exercise is a tried and true form of physical activity that can get you into shape in a hurry. It helps improve heart health, keeps your mind clear, and keeps you feeling good. You can ease into an aerobic program, and once you’re in the groove of things, there are a wide variety of activities that you can partake in. Want to be healthy? Aerobic exercise is the ticket.

Safe Weight Loss

Safe Weight Loss is The Real Goal.

Back in the seventies and eighties it seemed that there were new fad diets coming around nearly every week. First it was the all fruit juice diet, then the no fruit juice diet. Some diets were all about beets and beet juice (yuck) and some diets were all about eliminating all dairy products.

No fat or low fat diets were very popular for a while until scientists debunked them because most of them had high caloric content which actually made you gain weight. We all of course know about the protein diets that eliminated most of the carbohydrates from the diet like the Atkins diet. One thing is for certain, for real, effective, safe weight loss you first need to understand how the body works and what effect certain foods have on our bodies.

We all know those types of people that are naturally skinny and can eat anything they want without getting fat. There seem to be these people everywhere we look, especially on TV, the movies, or in all the magazines. They seem to be mocking us regular folks with their smug attitudes and easy fit lifestyles while the rest of us have to shop at big and tall stores and hit the gym every day with the false hope of losing an inch or two. Why can some people eat anything they want and some get fat just looking at rich foods? Genetics does have a lot to do with it, but so does the absence of certain neurotransmitters in the brain that tell you when you are full. If you donít have these signals, you will keep on eating even if you should be feeling full.

When you first get a plate of food and you are hungry everything tastes great and your brain tells your body to eat in order to survive. For naturally skinny people when they eat a sufficient amount, the brain sends out signals to make them stop eating. As they feel fuller, the food starts tasting not so good anymore. All of this is a natural system that ensures that we eat just enough to continue to live. For fat people or people who have a propensity to gain weight (and that is a lot of people in the U.S.), the mechanism is broken and somehow the brain refuses to tell them that they are full and should stop eating.

To achieve safe weight loss then one must eat foods that will break the cycle. Certain foods at certain times of the day will trigger our brains to shut down our eating. In the morning it is best to eat protein, and that means egg white omelets with some lean ham and some veggies tossed in. A mid morning snack will keep the metabolism burning and let you have safe weight loss without feeling hungry. Lunch should be a salad without croutons and just a little bit of dressing. Mid afternoon you need another snack such as an apple or a Zone Perfect bar. Dinner needs to be some lean meat and brown rice or one slice of lean whole wheat bread. If you crave a snack in the evening, try some light yogurt. Stop eating sugar of any kind and no fried foods.

Safe weight loss will result if you combine this plan with a consistent exercise routine that includes aerobics and some weight training at least four times a week. Exercise and lots of small, carefully planned meals during the day will result in safe weight loss.

An intellectual disability

An intellectual disability is not a mental disease, but a predisposition not to use the intellect.

Intellectual disability is not a general term of psychology or psychiatry. Such terms are more specific, with mental disability holding the consensus as the adequate term to designate any general psycho-physical disability. The intellect is itself not recognized as a component of the psyche in modern psychology. It is the psyche. The word is often, but not correctly, used in place of the more likely thinking or cognitive disability and associated with a ìlearningî or ìmemoryî disorder. The word does reference the process of thinking or reasoning, but lapses in the intellect are errors in deduction or induction, even judgment. Such errors do not constitute an intellectual disability.

The word intellect or intellectual is most often used to designate that part of man that he experiences as pure subjectivity. In this usage, intellectual disability refers to a sickness of the entire psyche, which would include not only cognition, perception, and emotion, but imagination as well. The intellect in most literature is often synonymous with the term soul and is also found in the place of the word spirit. In fact, many writers use the term to designate a faculty that has the ability to apprehended pure notions or ideas. Kant assigns to the intellect the faculty of insight into pure forms, into pure ideas that are not givens in the world of sense, in nature. Thus, a disabled intellect in this context would mean a person is unable to take an attitude of interest appropriate to apprehended pure formal ideas. This is more precisely a cognitive disability meaning one is unable to apprehend these preexistences, these abstract ìideasî. Very few people are able.

Modern usage of the term intellect assigns a more inclusive meaning to the term, not limiting it to subjective experience only, but extending it to include all ideas that individuals may or have experienced at one time or another. Modern history, for instance, delineates an entire segment of human history as ìintellectual history.  In this view, all ideas, whether in mathematics, science, philosophy, or art, are part of the intellectual heritage of a people, its intellect. Claiming a person has an intellect disability in this context would imply a lack of experience or knowledge in one of any of these areas of intellectual history. We do not say a person is intellectually disabled because they are not conversant with art, sculpture, philosophy, theology or any of the other artifices of the intellect. We would merely say they are intellectually deficient in the given area.

Intellectual disability may be appropriately used, however, when referring to a person who is in fact in a purely vegetative state, rather what we refer to as being brain dead in its strictest medical sense. Describing someone in this condition as having an intellectual disability is more appropriate on the comedy stage when they may be joking of such characters as George W. Bush or Dan Quail.

There is only one place in psychological parlance where one might be said to be disabled intellectually, and this is with reference to intelligence tests, the well known I.Q. Test. A person achieving a low score may be said to have an intellectual disability, but again, this term is extremely general even in this context. Still used to designate such a person, it is now more common to be specific in designating the area of low score, such as being cognitively disabled.

Given that the intellect encompasses the whole mind, and the disability is one of intelligence, the best treatment for such a disability is study, education, and perhaps training in the thinking or reasoning process. This is not a disease, but a deficiency. Study, study, study is the surest cure.

Kids Eating Healthy

Kids Eating Healthy Has Never Been More Important.

As more and more young people are becoming obese these days, kids eating healthy is more important in this day and age than in any other time in history. There is an obesity epidemic in this country today that one health official called the greatest threat to our national security. Children are having more health problems related to their weight than ever before, and proper steps need to be taken to reverse this trend.

The fact of the matter is, it used to be that parents made sure that their children were eating healthy. When I was growing up, we had to finish our vegetables before we could get desert, and our parents really didn’t care whether or not we wanted to eat them. It was just something that you did, and you did not complain about it or you went to bed hungry.
Kids eating healthy back in those days meant that kids ate what their mothers cooked for them. We rarely went out to eat, and when we did, we ate the vegetables at the restaurant we visited. We hardly ever ate fast food until we were teenagers, and we spent our time outside playing instead of in front of the television or computer.

I really don’t want to make it out like the good old days were the best time of all, but there is a lot to be said about how we ate and lived our lives in general compared to today. Our parents were not concerned with being our best friends or winning any popularity contests.
It seems that today, many parents want to do just that, and the idea of kids eating healthy seems to go by the wayside. Because of that, kids, and American kids in particular, are heavier than ever before, and one study suggests that this may be the first generation that does not have as long a projected life span as their parents’ generation.

The good news is that it is not too late to do something about it, and a lot of school districts and teachers are trying to instill good eating habits into their students and explain the necessity of kids eating healthy to form good eating habits throughout their lives.
The reality is, with kids eating healthy, they will feel better physically, perform better in school and greatly reduce their risk of becoming overweight or obese.
It is such an important issue these days that we get kids to start eating healthy. That is when they learn the most and are the most able to establish proper eating habits that can last the rest of their lifetime. We need to have the love and the courage to act now.

Breast cancer cure

Engineering your Own Personal Virus to Attack your Breast Cancer. For dollarsignr20?

There is such  buzz these days about the Pink Army Cooperative – the first people-owned biotech company. And it promises to bring down the cost of the breast cancer cure besides making it more effective. Paying dollarsignr20 buys you a place in the cooperative and grants you admittance to the cooperativeís brand of cancer cure which uses synthetic biology. Women with a family history are jubilant over the promise of a new breast cancer cure. They are eager to join in as they see they have nothing to lose, and if the research shows results, much to gain, for sure. The co-op has certainly a long way to go. The research has not made much progress yet. But people are eager to join because the concept is very attractive and there is a great willingness to help cancer research.

Conventionally, surgery is the way to go for breast cancer cure when itís a localized tumor. Chemotherapy follows the surgery and sometimes precedes it too.In breast cancer cure, the standard practice is for the surgeon to make completely sure that he has excised the cancer completely. More tissue has to be removed than is absolutely necessary, to leave out clear margins. You see where this is going – women the world over wish for a better alternative to this kind of benign torture.

So what is the biology technology approach the Pink Army Cooperative has in mind? What they do is, to engineer a virus whose genetic programming is to infect breast cancer cells and kill them. An out-of-control infection for an out-of-control cell type in the body. Once you have your name down on their subscription list with your dollarsignr20, you can tap into the breast cancer cure they produce for free. Basically, your prescription gets filled based on your subscription. And your investment would bring you not just your medicines when you need them, you would get a share of ownership of the cure that your money engineered.

So why is this method any better than the regular major pharmaceutical corporations’ method? Is it just that it ends up costing you to buy your medicines in the end? The thing is, the major corporations invest too much money in their research, and when new developments appear on the horizon, they are unable to adjust, to change course quickly – kind of like a large ship bearing down on an iceberg. Biology technology is not as esoteric as it once was, and smaller and nimbler competitors can do as good a job. To have the large pharmaceutical corporations keep churning out their ordinary medicines and chemicals from a generation past, makes no sense. This day belongs to biology technology.

The computerized devices needed to sequence DNA don’t need a billion dollars to buy anymore. Any modestly funded enterprise can get their hands on them, and study each unique patient’s unique breast cancer DNA. The doctors then engineer a unique virus for just the kind of breast cancer DNA that particulat patient has. Even a couple of years ago, that kind of space-age breast cancer cure would cost tens of millions of dollars each patient. It’s still something that’ll set you back a million today, but it’s progress. And if you are with the Pink Army Co-op , you could probably get it down to pocket change.

Alcohol intervention

Ghastly information may save a teen from the deadly consequences of alcohol intoxication.

The mature people understand; they have lived and seen the deadly results of alcohol abuse, perhaps in their neighborhood, in their own family, perhaps in their own life. Most of them have learned that alcohol is as dangerous as a firearm in the hands of irresponsible, mature people, or in the hands of a teen. We have to leave the mature adult to exercise maturity when using alcohol; if they’re abusive, you can be sure they’ve already been informed. It’s the youth that we must focus our efforts in preventing them from ever using alcohol, at least while they’re under age, and, more urgently, on the techniques alcohol intervention.

Youth, we all remember the rebellious heart, that fear of isolation, the need to belong. Early and late teens are when these feeling are most acute, the very moment when they are standing on the brink of what every parent prays will be a productive and joyful adulthood for their child. It is at this very moment that our teens are confronted with the temptation to indulge in alcohol. For some, it may be a mere experimentation, but for others, it is the beginning of a life of misery and shame. Once youthful experimentation become youthful excess, we have a troubled teen. If alcohol is the excess ñ they should not be using it at all ñ it’s time for alcohol intervention, time for serious counseling, time to give them the best of yourself, for this may be your last chance.

What is it we are trying to tell our children when we must subject them to alcohol intervention? We might expound on its immediate effects on the body, on the skin, the digestive system, on the brain, but will they not think to themselves, who cares? It’s my body after all. While these concerns should not be omitted, we should put our greatest emphasis on the consequences that may result from alcohol use and abuse. We have to tell them of those scarier consequences, even if these are harsh. This is information with a punch.

Is that teenager drinking and driving? Then in your alcohol intervention, show them the results, real images, of the dead and maimed victims of the drunk driver. You can actually get videos that are created just for this purpose, to scare them into realization. There are lithographs and posters that show them the physical effect, what is actually happening when they take that drink. You can show them the affects on their liver, on their brains, the ugly destruction that occurs. You can find games that are designed to teach the teen what happens when they drink. There are movies, books, a brain or fetus in a beer mug. These are graphic images, startling, frightening. There’s nothing pretty about these images, but that is just the point. There’s nothing pretty about alcohol abuse.

When you have to do an alcohol intervention for a teen, give them the information that might save them. Give them the ugly truth.