Guide Easy For Health

Some of the greatest benefits for me have been my ability to tap into ‘my well of inner peace’ whenever I need to, my connection with, and to, spirit, achievement of greater clarity and balance at the end of each session, and overall wellbeing. Meditation also gave me something else.

The meditation journey for me involved profound inner change as I stepped into enlightenment. Once that door opened for me, well that was it! No turning back…ever – something which no-one ever told me.

Enlightenment, for me, is such a strange thing, and of course is many things to many people. When I stepped into this state of being, I waited for the whiz bang fireworks to begin, hear the blaring trumpets and the voice of God (which I imagined would be kind of booming and earth shattering!). I’m not sure what else I expected but what I experienced was a deep sense of stillness. The door opened, I stepped through the doorway, and how I perceived life changed forever. The clarity with which I saw things in that moment almost blinded me ?yet it was so gentle.

This didn’t mean to say I ceased doing mundane things such as housework, cooking and cleaning. No – unfortunately that continued and continues to this day and will in the future also. Nope, for me enlightenment meant that I simply knew things and accepted; some possibly call this truth?

I believe that Truth or Enlightenment is knowing absolutely everything about all things at the exact same time without pinpointing one solitary thing.

Truth is much like acknowledging anything really, in a passive way. Words are grossly inadequate in describing this sense of being. All I can say is it’s simply too HUGE to explain with words but it’s something I experience whenever I meditate, or zone out.

I’m not immune to daily issues however I’m not impacted to the same degree as before either. I can say that whilst chaos reigns around me I can easily tap into my well of inner peace. It’s helped me through the many trials and tribulations I call life and thank my lucky stars that I started practising meditation when I did. Read more…

LASIK, an acronym for Laser-assisted In Situ Keratomileusis, is a form of refractive laser eye surgery procedure performed by ophthalmologists intended for correcting vision. The procedure is usually a preferred alternative to photorefractive keratectomy, PRK, as it requires less time for full recovery, and the patient experiences less pain overall.

The LASIK technique was made possible by Dr Jose Barraquer (Colombia), who around 1960 developed the first microkeratome, used to cut thin flaps in the cornea and alter its shape, in a procedure called keratomileusis. This procedure was developed and pioneered by the world leading Barraquer Clinic, based in Bogota, Colombia.

LASIK surgery was developed in 1990 by Dr. Lucio Buratto (Italy) and Dr. Ioannis Pallikaris (Greece) as a melding of two prior techniques, keratomileusis and photorefractive keratectomy. It quickly became popular because of its greater precision and lower frequency of complications in comparison with these former two techniques.

In 1991, LASIK was performed for the first time in the United States by Drs. Stephen Brint and Stephen Slade. The same year, Drs. Thomas and Tobias Neuhann successfully treated the first German LASIK patients with an automated microkeratome.

Patients wearing soft contact lenses typically are instructed to stop wearing them approximately 7 to 10 days before surgery. One industry body recommends that patients wearing hard contact lenses should stop wearing them for a minimum of six weeks plus another six weeks for every three years the hard contacts had been worn.

Before the surgery, the surfaces of the patient’s corneas are examined with a computer-controlled scanning device to determine their exact shape. Using low-power lasers, it creates a topographic map of the cornea.

This process also detects astigmatism and other irregularities in the shape of the cornea. Using this information, the surgeon calculates the amount and locations of corneal tissue to be removed during the operation. The patient typically is prescribed an antibiotic to start taking beforehand, to minimize the risk of infection after the procedure. Read more…

Hip replacement is a medical procedure in which the hip joint is replaced by a synthetic implant. It is the most successful, cheapest and safest form of joint replacement surgery. The earliest recorded attempts at hip replacement, which were carried out in Germany, used ivory to replace the femoral head.

Use of artificial hips became more widespread in the 1930s; the artificial joints were made of steel or chrome. They were considered to be better than arthritis but had a number of drawbacks. The main problem was that the articulating surfaces could not be lubricated by the body, leading to wear and loosening and hence the need to replace the joint again (known as revision operations).

Attempts to use teflon produced joints that caused osteolysis and wore out within two years. Another significant problem was infection. Before the advent of antibiotics, surgery on the joints carried a high risk of infection. Even with antibiotic treatments, infection is still a cause for some revision operations. Such infections are not necessarily caused at surgery; they can also be the result of bacteria entering the bloodstream during dental treatment.

The modern artificial joint owes much to the work of John Charnley at the Manchester Royal Infirmary; his work in the field of tribology resulted in a design that completely replaced the other designs by the 1970s. Charnley’s design consisted of 3 parts ?(1) a metal (originally Stainless Steel) femoral component, (2) an Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene acetabular component, both of which were fixed to the bone using (3) special bone cement. The replacement joint, which was known as the Low Friction Arthroplasty, was lubricated with synovial fluid.

The small femoral head (22.25mm) produced wear issues which made it suitable only for sedentary patients, but – on the plus side – a huge reduction in resulting friction led to excellent clinical results. For over two decades, the Charnley Low Friction Arthroplasty design was the most used system in the world, far surpassing the other available options (like McKee and Ring).

In 1960 a Burmese orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. San Baw (29 June 1922 ?7 December 1984), pioneered the use of ivory hip prostheses to replace ununited fractures of the neck of femur (‘hip bones’), when he first used an ivory prosthesis to replace the fractured hip bone of an 83 year old Burmese Buddhist nun, Daw Punya. This was done while Dr San Baw was the chief of orthopeadic surgery at Mandalay General Hospital in Manadalay, Burma. Dr San Baw used over 300 ivory hip replacements from the 1960s to 1980s.

He presented a paper entitled ‘Ivory hip replacements for ununited fractures of the neck of femur’ at the conference of the British Orthopeadic Association held in London in September 1969. An 88% success rate was discerned in that Dr San Baw’s patients ranging from the ages of 24 to 87 were able to walk, squat, ride the bicycle and play football a few weeks after their fractured hip bones were replaced with ivory prostheses. Dr San Baw’s use of ivory was, at least in Burma during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (before the illicit ivory trade became rampant starting around the early 1990s) cheaper than metal. Moreover, due to the physical, mechanical, chemical, and biological qualities of ivory, it was found that there was a better ‘biological bonding’ of ivory with the human tissues nearby the ivory prostheses. An extract from Dr San Baw’s paper, which he presented at the British Orthopeadic Association’s Conference in 1969, is published in Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (British edition), February 1970. Read more…