I’m Madeline, a health editor and content strategist with a passion for public health.
Having hip pain as you age is more common than you think. About 50% of older adults say they have hip or knee pain. Luckily, there are things you can do to feel better.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women living in the United States, second only to skin cancers.
If you were recently diagnosed with breast cancer, or you know someone who was, books can be a great way to answer your questions and learn more about breast cancer. Here are some great breast cancer reads, as recommended by doctors and people living with breast cancer.
Reading blogs created by others living with it (or blogging yourself) can be a good way to connect to other people in the breast cancer community. Here are six of the best breast cancer blogs, recommended by doctors and people living with breast cancer.
If you have lung cancer, it’s common to notice less of an appetite or to lose weight without trying. The disease and its treatment can have an effect on your appetite and how your body breaks down food and uses nutrients.
Some people who have lung cancer take dietary supplements and vitamins to make sure their bodies get all the nutrients they need.
Certain supplements are safe and even helpful when you have lung cancer. Others may interfere with your treatment. Always ask your doctor before taking a dietary supplement or vitamin.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — otherwise known as COPD — is a chronic lung disease. When you have COPD, you might have a cough, shortness of breath, wheezing, or have trouble breathing. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of COPD.
If you have COPD, managing the symptoms and making lifestyle changes can be one of the most important parts of your treatment plan.
The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, recently surveyed about 40,000 LGBTQ people across the United States who were ages 13-24 to gain insight regarding mental health, among other topics.
A key finding was that 40 percent of the respondents said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year. While troubling, those statistics weren’t a shock to public health experts.
“I think we know that LGBTQ youth are a vulnerable population and I think we could do so much more to support them,” says Jessica Bernacki, a licensed clinical psychologist at the UCLA Gender Health Program, who was not a part of the Trevor Project research team.
Waking up once or twice during the night is normal. But if you wake up more than a few times during the night or if you can’t fall back to sleep, it might be time to try something else.
At some point, it makes sense to get out of bed. If you do get up, though, don’t worry — you’re not giving up for the night. You still need rest, and your goal is to get back to sleep as soon as possible.
To do that, here are some helpful tips to help you get back to sleep after you get out of bed.
“Having our faces covered has caused distress and frustration for me,” says Greg Reese, a Deaf high school English teacher born and raised in Atlanta. “There is an option of a clear see-through mask, but it is not easily available in sufficient numbers.”
The difficulty of not being able to see faces clearly also affects communication between deaf individuals and interpreters.
Salt is a seasoning that can flavor food and act as a preservative. It’s about 60% chloride and about 40% sodium. Nearly all unprocessed foods — think veggies, fruits, nuts, meats, whole grains, and dairy foods -- are low in sodium. The salt that we do eat helps relax and contract muscles, lends a hand with nerve impulses, and balances the minerals and water we take in.
Gicell Rodriguez, the owner and lead planner of Luna Rosa Weddings & Events in Atlanta, said the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly changed the way she handles weddings. That means following protocols such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
Rodriguez recalls the impact on her business early in the pandemic, when the lockdown put everything on hold. For “a couple of months,” she said, “everyone in the wedding industry was very nervous about when that next inquiry was going to come. It was at a standstill.”
Many students choose to take it easy during their summer break. But instead of spending the remaining days of her summer vacation sleeping in, Sombal Bari is on the phone for hours at a time to stop the spread of COVID-19 through her job as a contact tracer.
Bari, from the southwest Georgia town of Cairo, is a student in the master’s program for social work and public health at the University of Georgia. She has a passion for promoting health in rural areas, so when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the UGA College of Public Health sent out an email looking for available students, she answered the call.
Billy Hendrix, a 30-year veteran of the funeral industry, thought he had seen it all. But the last few months have changed his mind. He says he has experienced ups and downs in the business over the years. But he said he’s never seen anything affect what he does quite like COVID-19, which has put some funerals on hold and limited which services can be offered.
“Sometimes we feel defeated — that we’re not giving our family everything that we should and we’re restricted to some degree,” Hendrix said.
Peter Dale, a restaurateur and chef born and raised in Athens, had never seen anything like it. On Monday, the streets of Athens were empty. The University of Georgia’s campus was silent. Restaurants like his, usually busy with the lunch rush, sat quiet and mostly deserted.
“That kind of made it a little scarier,” Dale said. “Because we knew that something was coming.”
Before traveling to China in late January, Holly Bik and her husband watched countless news reports and read as much as they could about the novel coronavirus, which had been detected in the country a few weeks earlier. After weighing the odds, the couple went ahead with their travel plans. Things would be fine, they figured. They weren’t going to the heart of the outbreak.
“It wasn’t until we actually had gotten to China that everything blew up in the media, and . . . the scale of the problem really became apparent,” recalled Bik.
As a young girl living in a small town outside of Normandy, Germany, Sanni Baumgärtner’s love for clothing and apparel developed first with vintage fashion. She fondly remembers rummaging through her mother’s closet and borrowing her grandfather’s coat. Baumgärtner also frequented flea markets in search of pieces like ’70s-era leather jackets.
Though she no longer lives in Germany, her love for fashion still runs strong through Community, a shop Baumgärtner opened in 2010 to offer an alternative—with often more sustainable options—to conventional, fast-fashion retail.
Some experts predict the global fast-fashion industry will face considerable consumer backlash due to its negative environmental impacts. Consumers are driving this change to force brands to acknowledge their ecological footprint and become more transparent with their ethical practices or lack thereof.
Public employees have the right to speak to the press without going through the boss, but workplace gag orders continue to violate their freedom of speech, says a report from The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, a nonprofit educational center.
The findings could have particular implications for health care journalists, the center’s director says.
“It’s not legal for a public agency to tell its employees they are forbidden from speaking to the media,” said Frank LoMonte, Brechner Center director and a journalism professor at the University of Florida. “And if you encounter a policy like that, you should know that the agency is breaking the law.”
University of Georgia researchers are receiving millions of federal dollars to help create a “universal” flu vaccine. But what does that term mean? And will a breakthrough vaccine persuade more Americans to get flu shots?
Right now, fewer than 40 percent of adults get a flu shot. And that’s bad.
When Precious Jones was a girl visiting her grandmother in Trenton, New Jersey, she was responsible for tasks like watering the garden or drying out the herbs. Her grandmother was a midwife, but she also cared and tended for her garden.
Little did Jones know the wisdom of her grandmother would fuel her entrepreneurial spirit and help Jones start her own company, MEplusTEA.
When Athens native Lamon Carson attended Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School as a child in the mid-2000s, entrepreneur Jeff Snowden was invited to teach problem-solving and creativity at the school for a program through the Chamber of Commerce. After he finished speaking, Carson approached him.
“This little boy came up to me and was like, ‘I want to do what you do,’” Snowden said. “And I never shielded these kids from anything, so I was like, ‘Yeah, right you do. Do you know how hard this job is?’”
Years later, when Carson was a teenager, he picked up the phone and called Snowden, to start what would become a powerful friendship.
Andree Terry is in her element. She picks up a bar of soap and with a knife, quickly shaves the soap’s edges before placing it aside.
The essence of the room can be captured in whiffs: a hint of lemon here, a slight note of ginger there. The rhythmic sounds of blade on soap are constant and Terry works to her own beat.
Like a machine, Terry grabs soap after soap, smoothing all edges. Sunlight streams in through the window, making the knife gleam. Terry continues to perfect her soaps, almost nonchalantly, but every slice is done with purpose.
