Live Well Be Gorgeous

By Jen Laskey, Special to Lifescript
If you have fibromyalgia, you know that life is 10 times harder. The complex chronic pain disorder affects every facet of your day. So how can you cope? Here are 7 symptom tamers. Plus, how much do you know about fibromyalgia? Take our quiz to find out…

It’s bad enough that you have fibromyalgia, a painful, puzzling disorder. What’s worse is that every symptom – from brain fog, to pain, fatigue and depression – hurts not only yourself but also your relationships, work life and physical, emotional and mental health.

There is no cure, which means you just have to learn to live with fibromyalgia and take steps to ease its symptoms.

“Effectively treating fibromyalgia requires a combination of medication and lifestyle skills,” says Daniel Clauw, M.D., fibromyalgia expert and professor of anesthesiology and medicine at the University of Michigan. He’s also director of the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center there.

He and other experts offer 7 ways to manage your symptoms:

1. Start exercising.
No question that working out is good for everyone, but it can especially help fibromyalgia sufferers, who often feel stiffness (especially after waking in the morning) and restless leg syndrome.

Mary Uhazi is drowning in a sea of debt that she built up slowly over more than two decades of easy credit, but now worries she won’t be able to pay off because of the recession.

Mary Uhazi has more than $60,000 in credit card debt and, by her own account, “nothing to show for it.”

“You have some clothes, you have some dinner, you have a handbag, you have whatever, but it’s not $11,000 worth or it’s not $60,000 worth,” Uhazi said.

Uhazi is drowning in a sea of debt. And, like millions of other Americans, it is a debt load that she built up slowly over more than two decades of easy credit that made it all too simple to spend. Now she worries she won’t be able to pay it off because of the recession, which has led to a reduction in her salary and an increase in her credit card bills. …Click on picture for full story

By Linda Childers, Special to Lifescript

Padma Lakshmi is best known as the host of Bravo’s hit reality show “Top Chef,” but for years she suffered silently with endometriosis, a painful gynecological condition that affects more than 10 million American women and girls. In this Lifescript exclusive, the star discusses her experience with the disorder, plus the scoop on “Top Chef” and more…

While she’s graced dozens of magazine covers, Padma Lakshmi harbored a painful secret: She suffered from endometriosis, a female reproductive disorder in which the endometrium, which normally lines a woman’s uterus, grows in other places as well, typically on the fallopian tubes, ovaries or the tissue lining a woman’s pelvis.

Left untreated, endometriosis can cause pelvic pain, excessive bleeding, fertility problems, back pain and painful monthly periods.

Lakshmi’s menstrual cramps left her bedridden for days. While friends tamed period pain with heating pads and over-the-counter medicines, the “Top Chef” host relied on the prescription narcotic Vicodin for relief.

Yes that is actor  Minnie Driver’s unmistakable chin to help make a point that healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants.

WASHINGTON – Eeeww. There’s a zoo full of critters living on your skin — a bacterial zoo, that is. Consider your underarm a rain forest. Healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants. And that’s not a bad thing, said genetics specialist Julia Segre of the National Institutes of Health, who led the research.

Sure they make your sneakers stinky, “but they also keep your skin moist and make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria don’t enter your bloodstream,” she said. “We take a lot for granted in terms of how much they contribute to our health.”

People’s bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But scientists don’t have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health. The NIH’s “Human Microbiome Project” aims to change that, recruiting healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbor so scientists can compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry — from acute infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis

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