Your Questions About Benefits Of Exercise For Seniors

absent from school because of Anxiety and panic attacks?

I tend to be out of school for days to two weeks. I have depression and my life has been crap, but my biggest problem is anxiety. I was diagnosed with aspergers and my therapist said it was normal to have social-phobia. When ever I leave the front door, my brain freezes and I have a panic attack. My heart palpitates horribly. I miss school for days and then I get worse anxiety over missing those days. I’m a high school senior and I have never been able to get over this.
My therapist gave me a few breathing exercises that don’t work with me. truthfully, i end up elongating the panic attack when I try the exercises and it makes it harder for me to breathe. I went to my doctor and she requested I see my therapist more.
I don’t tell my family, they think the absences have to do with my immune system being incredibly weak. My guardian doesn’t pick up any school work while I’m out, so my anxiety worsens with the stress of work waiting for me.
I really need to fix this before I have to get a full time job and face college. I can’t go on as a child stuck in the corner of my room. Life does not work that way. What should I do?

Please no more breathing exercises. I really see no benefit of it in a attack; maybe in a less critical moment they might work.
Drinking and drugs are out of the question. I don’t care if other people do them but my health has been bad since I was born. why make it worse with harmful chemicals.

I think more analytical, so asking God is out of the solution.

Please do not compare me to a parent, I just turned 18 and I’m in the autistic spectrum. I’m nothing like your alcoholic relatives.

Would I benefit from another major?

Hello. I’m currently a high school senior and am going off to school in the fall. I plan on majoring in film and finance, as I intend to become a filmmaker and want to go to law school, to get my J.D./MBA, because law and bussiness are integral parts of film production. Getting my MBA could also help me manage my finances.

However, I am also planning to get certified as a personal trainer to work while in school. Would taking another major, like Exercise Physiology, and then getting a master’s in the field make me a more legit trainer? I know you don’t need a degree to train, but will it help? Is it worth it? Because as it is, I’m looking at a total of 7 years of intensive schooling, 3 for undergrad and 4 for law/business/film school.

Thank you all for your help.

please find the analysis in this article?

Several years ago, Dr. David Rowlands, a senior lecturer with the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health at Massey University in New Zealand, set out to study the role of protein in recovery from hard exercise. He asked a group of male cyclists to ride intensely until their legs were aching and virtually all of their stored muscle fuel had been depleted. The cyclists then consumed bars and drinks that contained either mostly carbohydrates or both carbohydrates and protein. Then, over the next few days, they completed two sessions of hard intervals. One took place the following morning; the next, two days later.

Dr. Rowlands found that the cyclists showed little benefit during the first interval session. But during the second, the men who ingested protein had an overall performance gain of more than 4 percent, compared with the men who took only carbohydrates, “which is huge, in competitive terms,” Dr. Rowlands says. Other researchers’ earlier studies produced similar results. Protein seems to aid in the uptake of carbohydrates from the blood; muscles pack in more fuel after exercise if those calories are accompanied by protein. The protein is also thought to aid in the repair of muscle damage after hard exercise. Dr. Rowlands’s work, which was published in 2008, was right in line with conventional wisdom.
Not so his latest follow-up study, which was published online in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise and should raise eyebrows, especially lightly plucked ones. After his original work was completed, Dr. Rowlands says, “we received inquiries from female cyclists,” asking to be part of any further research. So, almost as an afterthought, Dr. Rowlands and his colleagues repeated the entire experiment with experienced female riders.
This time, though, the results were quite different. The women showed no clear benefit from protein during recovery. They couldn’t ride harder or longer. In fact, the women who received protein said that their legs felt more tired and sore during the intervals than did women who downed only carbohydrates. The results, Dr. Rowlands says, were “something of a surprise.”
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Scientists know, of course, that women are not men. But they often rely on male subjects exclusively, particularly in the exercise-science realm, where, numerically, fewer female athletes exist to be studied. But when sports scientists recreate classic men-only experiments with distaff subjects, the women often react quite differently. In a famous series of studies of carbo-loading (the practice of eating a high-carbohydrate diet before a race), researchers found that women did not pack carbohydrates into their muscles as men did. Even when the women upped their total calories as well as the percentage of their diet devoted to carbohydrates, they loaded only about half as much extra fuel into their muscles as the men did.
Why women respond differently seems obvious. Women are, after all, awash in the hormone estrogen, which, some new science suggests, has greater effects on metabolism and muscle health than was once imagined. Some studies have found that postmenopausal women who take estrogen replacement have healthier muscles than postmenopausal women who do not. Even more striking, in several experiments, researchers from McMaster University in Canada gave estrogen to male athletes and then had them complete strenuous bicycling sessions. The men seemed to have developed entirely new metabolisms. They burned more fat and a smaller percentage of protein or carbohydrates to fuel their exertions, just as women do.
What all of this emerging science means for women and the scientists who study (or ignore) them is not yet completely clear. “We need more research” into the differences between male and female athletes, Dr. Rowlands says. In his own study, a particularly intriguing and mysterious finding suggested that the female cyclists somehow sustained less muscle damage during the hard intervals than the men did. Their blood contained lower levels of creatine kinase, a biochemical marker of trauma in muscle tissue. Did estrogen protect the women’s muscles during the riding? And if so, why did the female cyclists who ingested protein complain of sore and tired muscles during the sessions? “Honestly, I don’t know,” Dr. Rowlands says, adding that he does not think that his findings suggest that women should skip protein after exercise. “It’s true that we didn’t see evidence for a benefit,” he says. But his study was one of a kind. The findings need to be replicated.
In the meantime, female athletes should view with skepticism the results from exercise studies that use only male subjects. As Dr. Rowlands says — echoing a chorus of men before him — when it comes to women, there’s a great deal that sports scientists “just don’t understand.”

Do people who are against Obama’s health care reform think insurance companies care about them?

Health Insurance Profits Soar as Industry Mergers Create Near-Monopoly

by Mike Hall, May 27, 2009

Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while consumers paid more for less coverage. One of the major reasons, according to a new study, is the growing lack of competition in the private health insurance industry that has led to near monopoly conditions in many markets.

The report says such conditions warrant a Justice Department investigation and, says Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), provide compelling evidence of the need for a public health insurance plan option as part of the health care reform initiative President Obama and Congress are developing.

Schumer says the report from Health Care for America Now! (HCAN)

is the starkest evidence yet that the private health care insurance market is in bad need of some healthy competition. A public health insurance option is critical to ensure the greatest amount of choice possible for consumers.

According to the recently released HCAN report, “Premiums Soaring in Consolidated Health Insurance Market“:

In the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated, and insurers are thriving in the anti-competitive marketplace, raking in enormous profits and paying out huge CEO salaries.

These mergers and consolidations have created a marketplace where a small number of larger companies use their power to raise premiums—an average of 87 percent over the past six years—restrict and reduce benefit packages and control and cut provider payments.

In a letter to the Department of Justice’s Anti-Trust Division, Richard Kirsch, HCAN national campaign manager, and David Balto, former policy director of the Federal Trade Commission and now senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, write:

Simply put, the private insurance companies have secured monopolies or tight oligopolies and exercised that power to put profits ahead of patients….There were no actions taken against anticompetitive conduct by health insurers in the last administration, in spite of the fact that cases by state attorneys general have secured massive fines against these insurers. A lack of antitrust enforcement has enabled insurers to acquire dominant positions in almost every metropolitan market.

They ask for an investigation of the already consummated mergers that “harm competition or create an anticompetitive market structure.” They also urge the Justice Department to conduct investigations of “anticompetitive conduct by dominant insurance companies and challenge that conduct where appropriate.”

Many dominant insurers limit the ability of providers to choose rival insurers or inform patients about more efficient and comprehensive coverage. The DOJ should investigate tools used to stifle competition such as physician gag clauses, most favored nations provisions, all-products clauses, and silent networks, which prevent providers and consumers from having the full range of competitive alternatives.

Schumer last week co-sponsored a Senate resolution urging the creation of a public health plan option and says a public health plan “is critical to ensure the greatest amount of choice possible for consumers.”

We believe that it is fully possible to create a public health insurance plan that delivers all the benefits of increased competition without relying on unfair, built-in advantages. If a level playing field exists, then private insurers will have to compete based on quality of care and pricing, instead of just competing for the healthiest consumers

I am interested in becoming a physical therapist or MD…what are my options for service?

I am currently a senior in college and will be graduating in 2012. I have good grades and am in the highest ranked undergraduate program for my major (exercise science). I have a strong work ethic, and stay in good shape ( roughly 20 hrs a week dedicated to exercise) . I am intersted in becoming a physical therapist or possibly an MD but am also very interested in joining a branch of the service. I have been recommended to go to OTS, but am unsure how the process works as well as how it would benefit my ranking upon joining. I would like to serve as well as complete any medical/profession education as well. How would this work and what are my options? Thank you