How To Treat a Pinched Nerve in Your Lower Back

A pinched nerve in your lower back is also called nerve entrapment, or nerve compression. In layman terms, it is a sore part of the body. A pinched nerve in the lower back may cause anywhere from mild pain and minor discomfort to severe soreness that makes any type of movement excruciatingly painful. Anyone who has experienced the ordeal knows that you would want it to go away, as soon as possible.

Factors Affecting Pinched Nerve

A pinched nerve in the body may be caused by a number of factors. Poor posture where weight is unevenly distributed may result in lower back pain as muscles tend to compensate for the imbalance. Same goes with wearing shoes that do not offer good arch support as the pressure of your body weight is transferred from the arches of the feet to your lower back. Stress is also a known cause of lower back pain. Other factors include obesity, Morton's toe and foot misalignment, uneven leg lengths, prolonged sitting, and in more extreme cases by slipped vertebrae or a concussion on the spinal cord.

Chronic vs Acute Pain

To treat a pinched nerve in your lower back, first you have to know whether it falls under the acute or the chronic categories. Acute pain is pain that lasts for less than 3 months. These cases may be treated with back pain home remedies. Meanwhile, chronic pain is pain that is longer than 3 months. This usually requires a more intensive treatment preferably by a nerve doctor or a rehabilitation therapist.

Chronic lower back pain can be treated by either pressing heat or ice pack (never both, for your sake) over the affected area, or taking mild pain relievers. A gentle back rub using mild liniment may also alleviate the pain. Note that bed rest is never recommended, it will aggravate the situation. If you suspect that your condition is caused by stress, do gentle movement side to side, sit back and take plenty of me-time.

How to Treat Bipolar Effectively and in the Proper Way

Bipolar disorder is able to seriously disrupt a person's life. This is why treatment is so important, especially if you want to live a normal life. Otherwise you will find every area of your life being affected.

Treating Bipolar Disorder With Medication

Fortunately, there are several different types of medications available to treat bipolar disorder. They are mood stabilizers, anti-seizure, and antidepressants. This is good because whenever one doesn't help, you can either have the dose adjusted or try something else. Of course, you will also find that medications and treatment will vary from person to person.

The most commonly used medication is a mood stabilizer. This medication will help to stabilize and regulate your mood so that you won't experience bipolar episodes that range from mania to depression. Anti-seizure medications are also used to prevent mood swings in someone who has bipolar disorder. They are most commonly prescribed to those who have Bipolar II or another type of bipolar disorder that is rapid-cycling.

While antidepressants are sometimes prescribed as well, they are not all that effective whenever it comes to treating bipolar disorder. In the past it was more commonly prescribed than it is today. In fact, they are actually controversial now as some doctors feel that they may actually trigger manic episodes.

Some anti-psychotic medications may also be beneficial. This is especially true of Quetiapine, which is more commonly known as Seroquel. It is known to treat both manic and depressive episodes, thus the FDA has approved it for this very purposed.

Medicare Supplement Insurance Plans

Medicare supplemental health insurance is the health insurance taken in addition to the Medicare insurance. Supplemental refers to the add-on nature of the insurance; it supports the Medicare insurance by paying for costs that are not covered by Medicare. These include charges such as deductibles, copayments and coinsurance. Because it helps pay for gaps in the cost and reimbursements of the Medicare insurance, it is also called Medigap insurance. Private health insurers offer supplemental insurance plans; the prices for the plans vary from one insurer to another even for the same plan. Finding out the right plan is important from two aspects: getting the right supplemental insurance plan for your requirements, and getting it at the lowest cost.

Different Medicare Supplemental Insurance Plans

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS), the federal agency that administrators the Medicare program, has standardized the supplemental insurance plans into 10 plan types. These standardized plans are offered by private insurers as insurance products. The plans are named from A to N, with the plans names with E, H, I and J discontinued after May 31, 2010. Therefore, we have 10 plans named A, B, C, D, F, G, K, L, M and N. Plan F can be further divided into F and F with high deductible, which makes for a total of 11 plans.

The plans differ in the types of benefits they offer. The benefits can be divided under the following heads: Basic benefits, Skilled Nursing Care, Medicare Part A deductible, Part B deductible, Part B Excess Charges, Foreign Travel and Preventative Services. Even the basic benefits offered under different plans differ from one to another. For example, the Plan A offers just basic benefits, but is costlier than F deductible, which offers basic benefits in addition to other benefits. This is possible because plan A has more basic benefits.

How To Treat And Prevent Wrist Pain

The wrist is an unusual joint because stiffness or even fusion causes relatively little difficulty, while if it is wobbly and unstable there can't be real problems. The wrist provides the platform from which the fine motions of the fingers operate. It is essential that this platform be stable. The eight wrist bones form a rather crude joint that is very limited in motion compared with, for example, the shoulder, but which is strong, and stable. Almost no regular human activities require the wrist to be bent all the way back or all the way forward, and the fingers don't operate as well as when the wrist is fully flexed or fully extended.

The wrist platform works best when the wrist is bent upward just a little. When the wrist is in proper position, you can pull or push most efficiently. To illustrate this position, make a fist and put your thumb in the middle of the wrist. Looking down your arm, the thumb should be on an imaginary horizontal line going straight down the middle of your forearm.

The wrist is very frequently involved in rheumatoid arthritis, and the side of the wrist by the thumb is very commonly involved in osteoarthritis.

The "carpal tunnel syndrome" can cause pain at the wrist. In this syndrome, the median nerve is trapped and squeezed as it passes through the fibrous carpal tunnel in the front of the wrist. Usually the squeezing results from too much inflammatory tissue. The cause can be tennis playing, a blow to the front of the wrist, canoe paddling, rheumatoid arthritis, or many other activities that repeatedly flex and extend the wrist. In addition to wrist pain, this syndrome can cause pains to shoot down into the fingers or up into the forearm; usually there is a numb feeling in the fingers, as if they were asleep.