Tips About Health Care and Medical

Yoga can help tone and strengthen all parts of the body, including internal organs. The Full Boat Pose is an abdominal and deep hip flexor and strengthener, requiring you to balance on the tripod formed by your sitting bones and tailbone.

The benefits of the Full Boat include:

Strengthened abdomen, hip flexors, and spine

Stimulation of the kidneys, intestines and thyroid and prostate glands

Stress relief

Improved digestion

There are variations of this pose, including one you can perform while sitting at your desk! Learn more about this pose, including what it looks like, how to properly execute it, and who this pose may not be right for. See the Full Boat Pose.

Some decreased hearing ability seems inevitable with age - a new study found that the prevalence of partial hearing loss is about 21 percent in adults aged 48 to 59 years, but rises to 90 percent in those over 80. The investigators, from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, analyzed data on nearly 3,300 men and women ranging in age from 21 to 84. The research team also evaluated hearing impairment and measured word recognition at different sound levels (using both male and female voices) in the study participants. Their analysis showed that hearing impairment was more likely in men, in those who had lower education levels, worked in noisy occupations or had a history of ear surgery. But they also found that there may be a cardiovascular link to hearing impairment, as hearing loss was also correlated with the use of statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs), a higher hematocrit (a marker of blood viscosity) and the thickness of artery walls. The report was published online on Feb. 21 by the Archives of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery and will appear in the journal's May print issue.

Here's another reason to stay away from secondhand smoke: even if you never smoked or quit smoking years ago, just being around someone who does can increase your risk of hearing loss. A study conducted by a hearing aid company using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected from 1999 to 2004 showed that secondhand smoke could boost the risk of hearing loss in the low to mid frequencies for both former smokers and people who never smoked. Earlier studies have shown that hearing loss is a risk for active smokers, but this is the first one to look at the effects of secondhand smoke on hearing. The prevalence of hearing loss among former smokers was 14 percent for low to middle frequencies and 46.6 percent for high frequencies. Losses seen among those who never smoked were 8.6 percent for low to middle frequencies and 26.6 percent for high frequencies. More studies are needed to confirm these findings.

Keeping a journal has a hidden health benefit: A recent study indicates that keeping track of your eating habits in a diary or journal can help to double your weight loss. The study, published in the August 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine followed almost 1,700 overweight or obese men and women with an average weight of 212 pounds.

After 20 weeks of study participation (which included weekly group meetings, recommended daily reduction of 500 calories, 30 or more minutes of daily moderate intensity exercise, adherence to the DASH diet, and daily journal entries of food intake and exercise minutes) the total average loss was about 13 pounds. But the more that the participants wrote in their journals, the more weight they lost - on average, about twice as much as those who did not maintain records.