July 1-7, 2013 - Original Health Articles

For the first installment on healthcare reform, click here. Healthcare reform, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), implements requirements and limitations on health insurance companies to protect patients, especially the ability to drop or deny coverage to individuals due to pre-existing conditions.

Perhaps no other single piece of legislation in recent history has caused as much misunderstanding or controversy than the healthcare reform bill, aka Obamacare. Regardless of your position on the law, health care affects every citizen, so it's important to understand the basics.

What can you do if you love cats but your boyfriend is allergic?  Do you have to give up your peanut butter habit because kissing your partner can make him sick?  Couples are often confronted with these types of questions when one partner has allergies and the other doesn't.

Any woman who has had a yeast infection will do just about anything to make sure she doesn't get another. Some women get them again and again, and an unfortunate few have them almost all the time. How do you know if your diagnosis is "recurrent" or chronic? If your infection comes and goes, but you have healthy stretches of time in between infections, your yeast infection is recurrent.

There's whipped, wiped out, weary and just plain pooped. And then there's something else—chronic fatigue syndrome—a debilitating condition that affects one million Americans. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is also known as chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS) and is depicted by unremitting, severe fatigue.

You've been daydreaming about retirement forever and are eagerly counting down the years until you can say goodbye to your workaday ways. But do you have a clear vision of what retired life will look like and how you'll know it's time to move on to this next phase of life? "Retirement today is very different than it was in our grandparents' time," says Christine Bartel, host of CBS4's news show, Aging Independently, and CEO of Infinite Health & Wellness Inc.

For many Americans, a good work out regime is measured by action—what you did at the gym, how long you worked out, how many times you worked out in a week, how many calories you burned. This type of thinking, however, often ignores a necessary component of overall health and fitness: rest.

Ganglion cysts (ganglion means knot) are non-cancerous lumps that usually develop along the tendons or joints of the wrists, hands, ankles, or feet. They are filled with a thick, clear, mucous-like fluid and resemble a water balloon at the end of a stalk.

Vitiligo is a condition that causes areas of the skin (or hair) to completely lose pigment and cause lighter patches to appear. It can affect people of any ethnicity, and targets both women and men. In most cases, the condition is painless, though some people with vitiligo complain of itching and pain.

Anyone can get hurt stepping in and out of the shower and lifting up and down in the tub but the elderly and people with impaired mobility are especially vulnerable. Falling on wet, hard, surfaces can cause real, physical damage that can sometimes be fatal.

Though you may feel cautious, exercise could be one of the best things you can do if you have osteoporosis. That's because some exercises help preserve and strengthen your bones. However, some forms of physical activity can do more harm than good and what may be good for one person's bones may not be good for another's.

Celiac disease affects one in 133 Americans (about 2 million). And, an estimated 95 percent of those people are undiagnosed. People with celiac can't tolerate gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye which includes most grain, pasta, cereal and many processed foods.

For the more than 20 percent of the population that suffers from gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), eating a normal meal can be painful. GERD occurs when a structural defect in the lower esophageal sphincter enables stomach acid to work its way out of the stomach and up into the throat, causing pain and burning after eating.

When you look at a baby's eyes, the whites are bright, the color is vivid and the corneas are crystal clear. Look into the eyes of an older adult and you'll see the effect of time. But it's not just the outward appearance that has changed. For millions of people, cataracts change the way they see the world.