Warts are a common skin condition caused by a virus. Almost everyone has gotten one at one point or another, but the truth is, they’re persistent, disgusting, and can be awkward if they show up on a hand or a foot. We try all sorts of medication to get rid of them, from liquid nitrogen (cryotherapy) to concentrated salicylic acid to direct scalpel work. But is there an easier way – perhaps one that involves fewer trips to the doctor?

Studies have claimed that everyday duct tape can be more effective than any of these methods. All you have to do is cover the wart with duct tape for six days (if it comes off don’t be a worry wart, just reapply), then remove the tape, soak the wart, debride (euphemism for scraping off dead skin) it with a pumice stone, and repeat starting the next day. After a few cycles, the wart should be all gone. Just make sure you use grey duct tape — because other studies challenging the remedy have failed to remove warts by using the transparent kind. But please be careful to allow the area you’re covering to breathe if you should experience any redness or rawness.

Another dependable treatment is injection therapy with Candida antigen. If home remedies and doctor’s visits aren’t working, this injection therapy is rising to become the new way to fight warts. Now before I go on, I must share that Candida is the same yeast which causes yeast infections in women. I know – gross. But before you cringe and hit your back button know that doctors have been using Candida for three decades to test our immune systems. Recently, the Altoona Family Physicians Residency conducted a test showing that Candida antigen could help completely eradicate warts from your life in as little as one visit (maximum of five).

I realize this treatment is new and that in it itself can be a bit scary when you’re looking for an answer. I earlier this year I was quite stressed about life in general and got sick…very sick. Kidney infection sick. Right after a trip to a Los Angeles emergency room (horrid experience) and a good dose of antibiotics, I noticed a bump on my palm. Nothing serious, just very peculiar. Pretty soon it was a wart.

I couldn’t believe what I was looking at when it finally penetrated the surface of my palm. It was ugly and spotted and only getting worse. I made an appointment with a receptionist and the earliest they could squeeze me in was in a month. As soon as the receptionist told me, I looked down wide-eyed at the hideous bump on my palm and got the shivers. Ugh, I’m going to have to look at this and feel this for the next 30 days!

30 days later…I arrived at the office fifteen minutes early and boy was I ready to finally see the wart burned to smithereens. I remembered getting a wart removed with liquid nitrogen when I was ten and it hadn’t been too painful. But still I sat scared in the florescent waiting room. Finally, the nurse called my name and invited me into the patient room. She then proceeded to ask me about the wart and bring out the liquid nitrogen canister thingy. Have you seen one of these before? It looks like she cut off the Tin Man’s head and was going to use it to burn my hand off, which ironically is what she proceeded to do. Rather than concentrate the area the liquid nitrogen was going to hit, she pointed the Tin Man’s head at my hand from a foot away and released the liquid. My entire palm was burned. MY ENTIRE PALM. I have never felt so furious at a “doctor” – which I don’t even know if she was!

I immediately transfered to my home practitioner in San Diego, a dermatologist I trusted. I saw her every two weeks for my proper “freezing” as they call it. It is now April and instead of one wart, I have four. She told me not to use home remedies in between freezings as it could counteract the treatment and cause more, so every two weeks I would drive the hour and a half from L.A. to San Diego hoping that it would be the last (despite how much my mother liked it – now she was seeing me more than she could have ever hoped for). And two weeks ago it was the last. Two weeks ago my dermatologist gave up. She said my warts were just too resilient and stubborn (I thought, “Not as much as I am”). She recommended that her good friend Dr. So-and-so have a look.

A few minutes later…”Oh, hello Dr. So-and-so! This is Natalie I’ve been seeing her for months now and these warts just aren’t responding.” He says, “Have you ever heard of Candida antigen? It’s a wart injection therapy that many of our patients with this exact same problem have been trying and loving. Would you be interested in reading the Patient Education form?”

Of course I was! I could hardly handle the first month with those ugly things. Constantly hiding my hand in my pocket to avoid anyone’s glances. Embarrassed to even mention it to my closest friends. Embarrassed to even look at it. I read through and a second after I said, “Yes!” He had me sit on the exam table. He started to make small talk with me. All I’m thinking is, “Doc, come on get it over with. I hate injections, but I’ll make sure to hold still-even if I really want to kick and scream.” Then out of no where the guy sticks me. No warning or anything, just the fierce sting of a needle.

It’s been three weeks and two of my warts are gone.  Hopefully with one more treatment I’ll be 4 for 4.

Good luck, try what you feel comfortable with and if you’re just as determined and resilient as they are you’re bound to succeed.

(photo credit: OakleyOriginals)

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Today, you can do this in ten minutes:

1. You’ll make an inventory of the skills you’re most proud of.

2. You’ll gain a touch of experience speaking in a stressful setting.

3. (Hidden bonus!) You’ll identify a job you really want: one that matches those skills you love.

____________

Today I was put in a tight spot. I was participating in a psychology study measuring the physical effects of stress on the body, and a critical part of the experiment, apparently, was putting me into a stressful situation.

What this meant to the researchers was that I, wired with electrodes and a blood-pressure cuff, was reading a wonderful cooking magazine when a man and a woman walked into the room. The man asked me to stand up and turn around, which I did with only a minor entanglement in the wiring. He promptly informed me that, in a few minutes, they would return to the room. Then, I would give a 5-minute “interview” for them, telling them exactly why I deserved the job.

“Any questions before we leave?” he asked.

“What job?” I said.

“Whatever job you like.”

So they left, and I set to thinking.

Here, however, is where you come in. If you were in this situation, right now, what would you do? Take a piece of paper to plot out your speech – take just five minutes. And don’t forget the first step – choosing the job you’re interviewing for.

Now give the speech. Without the notes. It’s best if you have someone in the room there with you, timing you – that way you can’t tell how much time you have left. It’s not that you’ll run out of time. It’s that you’ll have a lot left, and you may not know what to do with it right away. Twice today I stopped and asked “How much time is left?” only to hear “Please continue.”

If this sounds jarring, that’s because it is. After my experience, my heart rate had jumped and my blood pressure was way up. I was lucky to have some experience with public speaking so that I could at least keep my knees from shaking. But the best part was that it forced me to dig a bit deeper into the specifics of my skills, figuring out exactly how they tied into the job I’d just described and detailing those benefits exactly.

So take that “stress” and make your day and your life a little better. And in just ten minutes, too.

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Do you face a long commute every day?  Is it hard to sit upright in the car?  Are you conscious of your driving posture, or is it hard enough to just stay awake?  If you’re starting your day with a pain in your back due to driving, then this article is definitely for you.

For Your Back

Via posturecorrectionblog comes a fine illustration of what a slouch in the car will do to your spine. 

This is especially disturbing when we think about what a spine ought to look like.  It gets even worse when you realize that it’s exactly what you’ve yelled at your teenager for doing.

So how can we keep our backs in order, even as our fists clench in the stress of traffic?

1. Get the car some feng-shui order

This should be obvious, but if the mirrors are in the wrong position or at the wrong angle, you’ll find yourself craning your neck to see behind you.  Also make sure you know where those mirrors are, so when you do need them you won’t have to snap your neck around trying to find them.  If  it helps, especially if your car has a large blind spot get a blind spot mirror to avoid neck contortions.

2. Sit back

Push the seat back until you can maintain about a 130-degree angle in your knees.  This will force your back to begin rounding – you’ll even feel your spine fall into alignment as your chest straightens out.  This adjustment will also take stress out of the knees themselves.  The ideal position will also keep your knees level with your hips.  They should not be arching as you reach the pedals.  Think of how uncomfortable and hunched you feel when your knees are up behind the steering wheel, and then remember: this is my car, not a clown car!

3. Bring the seat forward

This has the same effect as telling that lazy teenager to sit up right.  You know that slouch is bad for him – and now that you know your car seat is putting you in the same position, you should be able to avoid it.  Bringing the seat fully upright will put your back into alignment.  Of course, like that teenager, it will be slightly uncomfortable at first – and you’ll be tempted to put it back.  Don’t!  Getting a lumbar pillow or something similar may help you get over this and provide some extra support where you need it.

4. Relax!

Keeping your muscles tense and your fists clenched is a recipe for pain.  Sure signs to avoid include grinding your teeth or working your jaw, so if you start to develop any sort of pain anywhere, think about why.  If it’s a stress motion, relax.  Put on lighter music; stop if you need to.  Be sure to  breathe through any road drama – that is, don’t add too it by getting angry – and remember to always stretch any aches or pains you begin to feel.

A great way to work out any aches and pains that do arise is to stretch once you arrive.  Natalie demonstrates some great car stretches below…

Do both sides, holding the stretch, for 30 seconds.  These will keep your neck, legs, and back from getting sore after you drive – especially if you are looking forward to a long, painful day at a desk!

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Growing up my mom used to tell me to eat lots of strawberries to whiten my teeth. I used to do it because I loved the taste of strawberries – who doesn’t?

A part of me thought she might be be right, although most of me thought that I was ridiculously silly for believing her. But the joke, as it turns out, is on me – strawberries really can whiten your teeth!

Why It Works

Strawberries have a gentle whitening agent called malic acid which works wonders for removing any kind of surface discoloration (aka yellow enamel). So good-bye coffee and tea stains and hello gorgeous pearly whites!

Some research, however, partly debunks my mother.  Apparently just eating them doesn’t do much good, so maybe a small part of me was right to doubt her advice.

How to (Really) Get Those Pearly Whites Using Strawberries

Health.com reports that teeth can be whitened using a homemade paste of one strawberry and half a teaspoon of baking soda.  Brushing it on, then rinsing it off after 5 minutes can leave you with whiter teeth before long!

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An aromatherapy meditation can help you relax and unwind by keying to one of your most powerful senses. Get some incense and listen as I guide you through the experience.

Tip of the hat to Elizabeth Scott, MS

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Reward and punishment are two of the primary tools we use to change behavior.  Whether it be giving a friend the silent treatment or paying a child when he gets good greades, incentive techniques are widespread, and their efficacy is well-documented (read Chapter 2 of one of my favorite books for a fun look).  But rewards in particular are not all they’re cracked up to be: often, they actually deteriorate the experience they try to promote.

The main problem is the replacement of internal motivation with external ones.  If you try to get a child to raise his hand before speaking by giving him a cookie every time he does, the child quickly learns that the cookie is the main reward associated with raising his hand.  The core ideals that make raising a hand valuable – respect, for one – will not be part of the thought process.

“Giving students extrinsic rewards for engaging in learning tasks makes the implicit statement that the activity was not worth doing on its own merits.”        – Alfie Kohn

A reward system is like an evil carrot.

The worst part of this implicit message is that it retroactively affects a situation where a person has already developed an intrinsic motivation. So if, for example, a student loves reading and you create an incentive program for reading, you can destroy the internal love of reading. Once the switch is made from internal motivation to external motivation, the behavior can only be sustained by continuing to offer the reward. So once the reading incentives stop, the student stops reading.

Why?  It’s just the way we’re wired. If an activity has an external reward, we see the reward as a measure of the value of the activity.  This is a psychological reaction that makes biological sense.  If our ancestors were to go somewhere to find food, and one day the food were gone, would it make sense to keep traveling to that spot?  No.

Don’t let this confuse you, though, because punishments do permanently change behavior, even if they are taken away.  We develop permanent aversions to negative situations for the same underlying biological reasons.  If primitive man were to encounter a wolf, he wouldn’t be likely to return, would he?

So people can be conditioned by negative reinforcement, but not by positive reinforcement.  We all have encountered this in our personal lives when we promise ourselves some kind of reward for working out, or for waking up on time, but as the days pass we find that the reward is no longer enough to keep us exercising or pulling ourselves out of bed.

Think about a time when you earned a reward, whether or not someone else gave it to you.  Think first about the thing you did for the reward, then think about the reward itself.  Which is the positive memory?  Which thing feels like  “work?”  If you’re like most people, whatever you did to earn the reward has probably become a chore in your recollection.

That’s the reason that those self-rewards aren’t very effective.  Getting that treat over and over becomes less and less rewarding each time, while doing the task becomes more and more cumbersome.  At some point it’s just not worth it any more.  Then we fail.

The only way to overcome that challenge is to build an intrinsic motivation for whatever it is you want to do.  Don’t let an external reward become a source of motivation – don’t even tempt yourself to let that happen by creating one, because it invariably will.  By creating that reward, you send yourself the same message that a child would get: that the thing isn’t worth doing in its own right.

The key to creating a positive habit in you or in someone else is to tie the positive response directly to the achievement, rather than to the reward.  You should be happy because you went to the gym.  You should relish the good burn, the sweat on your forehead, and the pride of making it through a tough workout.  You shouldn’t be happy just because you let yourself eat a piece of key lime pie afterwards.

The same principle goes for others.  Direct praise for a good behavior is much more effective than a prize if you want to train a child.  At first, it may not seem that way – the allure of a reward system is that it is always immediately and perfectly effective – but over time the results will be more noticeable and dramatic.  Enjoyment and motivation can come from within rather than from without, and those personal motivators are the only ones that will always endure.

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After a stressful day at work, you can really feel anxious about the tasks you bumped to tomorrow’s to-do list. For me, this can cause such a restless mind that sleeping soundly becomes impossible. But meditation helps me immensely.

You can meditate at bedtime, lying down, which is a lot more comfortable than sitting, especially if you’re not in the best physical shape. Lie down on your back with your arms by your side and your legs extended. If this is uncomfortable try placing a pillow below your knees to relieve lower back pressure.

Close your eyes and take a deep inhalation. On the exhale allow yourself to become so relaxed that your hands curl up and your feet turn outwards. A lot can be racing through your thoughts at this point – what your boss said, a strange comment from a coworker, whatever. I clear my mind by closing my eyes and sitting back and watching. Watch your mind. If any thoughts arise, inhale and let them go on the exhale. Don’t allow them to engage you. Also try not to judge or identify with them. Just be a spectator and watch. You will soon find yourself waking up the next morning wondering why it’s been so long since you’ve slept like that.

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Doctors have long told their patients about the obvious danger shoving a Q-Tip into your ear canalcan cause: permanent damage to ear drum.

But before I go any further, I do wish to put forth the very important (lawsuit avoiding) disclaimer: I am using Q-Tip in the general sense to cover all “cotton-tipped applicators” and am not targeting the makers of any Q-Tip as the culprits, but users who have been trained by their parents and parents’ parents to use Q-Tips incorrectly.

Now that that’s finished… Q-Tips, if used to dig wax build-up out of your inner ear, can cause several vulnerabilities. Wax works as a protective coating in your ear to ward off bacteria and infection.  And if you go probing around in there too much, you could end up rupturing your eardrum or just packing soft wax even deeper into your ear. This “wax dam” impedes normal movement of your eardrum, actually causing hearing trouble. At that point all you can do is stream warm water into your ear until the wax softens again and hopefully takes its natural position inside your ear. If not then it’s time to see the doctor, which will definitely end in a long waiting-room wait, another lecture about how Q-Tips are only for external ear use, and a possibly painful treatment.

Let’s avoid this! Who wants hearing loss? a ruptured ear drum? an expensive medical bill?

And everybody knows to avoid ear candling, so…

Use hydrogen peroxide instead!

Hydrogen peroxide has the oxidizing properties capable of actually cleaning your ear without causing the damage Q-Tips do. You can buy it for $0.99 at CVS and it can last for months.

What are these cleaning properties?

1. It kills bacteria in your ear, helping you to avoid ear infections.

2. A half cap-full to full cap-full (per ear) massages your inner ear gently while cleaning it.

3. Since hydrogen peroxide is such a powerful cleaner, you need only use it twice a week (or as needed).

How do I use hydrogen peroxide to clean my ears?

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1. Obtain an ear syringe, cotton ball, or you can choose to just use the bottle cap, and hydrogen peroxide (duh). We’ll be using the example of the cotton ball.

2. Fill your cap halvsies and absorb the hydrogen peroxide (make sure it’s room temperature) with your cotton ball.

3. Tilt your head to the side until your ear is facing the ceiling .

4. Carefully squeeze the hydrogen peroxide into your ear. You should feel the delightful fizzing of the hydrogen peroxide with your ear wax.

5. After thirty seconds, or until the fizzing has stopped, place a dry cotton ball in your ear. Then tilt your head so that the hydrogen peroxide can drain into it.

6. Repeat the process for your other ear.

If you realize that you have frequent buildups of wax, I strongly suggest speaking with your doctor or seeing an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist.

It’s really important to remember that the wax in our ears works to keep dirt  and other bacteria from causing hearing problems, but that it’s good to clean your ears every now and then.

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