Feeling dizzy outside? Sprain your ankle while running on an outdoor track? Always craving ice cream?
Summer arrives with sun, humidity and frequently, a whole different host of health concerns. Here are the answers to these questions and a few other summer health problems.

A large part of the American population experiences travelers' constipation. That's because when people travel, they experience a change in lifestyle, schedule, diet, fluid intake and activity, which can result in constipation.

Further, the stress of packing or having to use bathrooms in airports, hotels or other peoples' homes can disrupt bowel functions. To combat this (and avoid a stomachache), pack healthy snacks for the road, eat at the same time that you normally would and limit caffeine intake.

Dizziness has a number of possible causes in the summer including dehydration due to lack of proper fluid intake, or the result of excess caffeine.

If you're prone to feeling dizzy, try wetting a washcloth to put on your wrists or neck, or even sucking on ice cubes throughout the day to continue cooling your body temperature. Remember to boost your water intake during the summer months - people don't realize how much fluid they lose in the heat.

If you're used to running on a flat surface like a treadmill, your chances for an ankle sprain or injury can increase when you're exercising outside.

If you feel a twinge or something more serious in your ankle joints, it's important to know how to handle it so you don't perpetuate the pain or injury.  It is recommended that you tend to the injury immediately and not trying to "walk it off."

Suggestions:

After trying this, it's time to decipher if the injury is a more serious one.

If you are unable to bear weight after an ankle injury or 'sprain,' you need to obtain X-rays to confirm that you don't have a fracture.  Tenderness and swelling are commonly present after an ankle sprain, but inability to bear weight is associated with a higher risk of having an ankle fracture."

Why is it that we crave ice cream so much more in the summer?  Cold drinks and foods have lower temperatures, which absorb more heat and satisfy your hypothalamus, which helps to control body temperature, thirst and even hunger.

While those cravings aren't such a bad thing, keep in mind that there are delicious homemade and healthy alternatives, such as frozen berries blended with bananas.

If you feel like you're having a harder time sleeping during the summer months, you're not crazy.

If the temperature is too warm when you're sleeping, it can cause your body to stay up.  We normally fall asleep when the body's core temperature drops at night. It's part of the normal circadian rhythm. If the temperature is too warm, we cannot fall asleep, leading to a night of tossing and turning. Sleeping in a cool, dark environment will help your body get the sleep that it needs.

Make sure to set your thermostat lower in the evenings and avoid intense exercising at night, which will cause your body temperature to rise.

This is common in the summer, especially when you're exercising outside. When you sweat, your blood rushes to the surface of your skin to help prevent your body from overheating.  As you sweat, you lose water and heat and your brain asks you to replenish in the form of thirst.

While water is obviously the best way to stay hydrated, it's important to drink it consistently as opposed to chugging it all at once.  Profusely chugging water can actually lead to dehydrated kidneys as the water may not be making its way to these organs. Excess water could be dispelled through the rectum, because the kidneys can only process half a liter per hour.

Also monitoring your hydration level by looking at the color of your urine: it should be straw-colored to transparent yellow.

And remember to avoid energy drinks. While it IS important to replace lost sodium (salt) as a result of sweating in the heat, consuming energy drinks to rehydrate may actually place you at higher risk for dehydration because of high amounts of caffeine contained in such beverages.

                                                     - By Stephanie Mansour, TODAY
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This summer, many of us will gather in a park or backyard for the unofficial kickoff to - and barbecue season!

Which means lots of beer will be consumed: Sales of the bubbly beverage begin to increase in May, peaking during the late summer, when we're all spending hot, lazy weekends gathered around our grill.

If you find yourself the host of a summer party, it's likely you'll wake up to a dozen half empty beer bottles scattered around the yard. But resist the urge to dump them out! You may be surprised to learn some of the ways you can put those flat suds to use. Use these four beer hacks around your house this summer to get the most out of every single drop:

Next time you spill coffee on the rug during a groggy Monday morning, reach for some stale beer leftover from your Sunday Funday. Just pour over the stain and blot with a clean towel.

Has your coffee table seen better days? Use flat beer on a clean cloth to restore the luster to wood furniture.

Time to crack open a shower beer. It turns out that beer can add shine and body to dull hair - thanks to the vitamin B and natural sugars in the beverage. Dump it over your hair, let it sit for a few minutes and then rinse it out with cold water.

Citronella candles not doing getting the job done? If your guests are getting eaten alive, pour stale beer into buckets and place them in the corners of your backyard. It turns out, small flies and mosquitos are a fan of a cold lager, too. Meaning they will be busy imbibing, and not nibbling on you.

                                                

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Summertime implies/suggests vacations, relaxation, positive changes, new directions and reminds us that it's time to "catch our breath"; it's time to renew old interests, friendships and begin new ones and so it is with our pursuit of reading.

 

Depending on interest as well as time, find, take the time to kick back, to relax, as well as excite our interests and challenge our minds.  There is a "feast of books" out there just waiting to be read!.......and here are a few!

 

Suggested titles and select reads include the "Killing Series" by Bill O'Reilly (not a "sleeper" among them!) but some difficult realities hit  the reader hard!). "Killing the Rising Sun" is unforgettable and a piece of history never to be forgotten. Another in the same series is "Killing Patton" also clarifying and informative. O'Reilly presents a consistent thread of successful relating of events and informative historical facts. This series could fill your summer months with hours of satisfying reading, well written, well presented and informative.

 

Perhaps something lighter, something more entertaining is on your agenda.  Return to Spencer Quinn's series "Chet the Dog Detective".A light, entertaining series with humor found thru-out!

 

"Breath iInto Air" by Kalanithi an informative and sensitive account of a young surgeon whose life was cut short sadly too soon but the value of his time spent, well remembered.

 

So renew, re-read, relax! Kick back, revisit past "reads" and pursue new ones! Reading ...always fulfilling,  no matter the season.

 

ENJOY!

	Pat

And, increasingly, patients are heading to the doctor armed with reams of data gathered from their devices. "They're essentially asking us to digest the data and offer advice about how to avoid cardiovascular disease," says cardiologist Euan Ashley, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford University Medical Center and Stanford Hospital and Clinics in northern California. And, being somewhat near Silicon Valley, he says he gets a lot of tech-savvy patients bringing fitness-tracker data to appointments.

The problem, he says, is that he just didn't know how reliable that data was. So, he and colleagues decided to study seven of the most popular devices and compare their accuracy to the gold-standard tests that doctor's use.

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There are more than 500 energy drink products on the market, and their increased popularity is matched by a significant rise in energy drink-associated emergency department visits and deaths.

Manufacturers and fans of these products claim they are as safe as caffeine, but there is little evidence to support that claim.

Caffeine in doses up to 400 mg (about five cups of coffee) is generally recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration. While energy drinks usually contain caffeine, little is known about the safety of some of their other ingredients the study team writes in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

To see what effects these other components have, researchers compared physical changes in a group of 18 healthy men and women after consuming a commercially available energy drink and after drinking another concoction with the same amount of caffeine but none of the other ingredients.

Besides 320 mg of caffeine - the amount in about four cups of coffee - the energy drink contained 4 ounces of sugar, several B vitamins and a proprietary "energy blend" of taurine and other ingredients that are often found drinks like Monster Energy, Red Bull and 5-Hour Energy.

Sachin A. Shah of David Grant Medical Center on Travis Air Force Base and University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and colleagues measured the participants' blood pressure and used an electrocardiogram (often called an ECG or EKG) to measure heart electrical activity for 24 hours after the subjects consumed the drinks.

An ECG change known as QTc prolongation and sometimes associated with life-threatening irregularities in the heartbeat was seen after drinking the energy drink, but not after drinking the caffeine beverage, the study team reports.

Several drugs have been withdrawn from the market just for causing ECG changes of a similar magnitude, the authors note.

Blood pressure increased by close to 5 points after drinking the energy drink, but by just under 1 point after drinking the caffeine beverage. Blood pressure also remained elevated six hours later.

These changes are by no means worrisome for healthy individuals, the researchers say, but patients with certain heart conditions might need to exercise caution consuming energy drinks.

Larger studies are needed to evaluate the safety of the noncaffeine ingredients contained in energy drinks, they conclude.

"The energy drink industry claims that their products are safe because they have no more caffeine than a premium coffee house coffee," said Dr. Jennifer L. Harris from University of Connecticut's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity in Storrs, who wasn't involved in the study.

"However, energy drinks also contain a proprietary 'energy blend,' which typically consists of stimulants and other additives. Some of these ingredients (including taurine and guarana) have not been FDA-approved as safe in the food supply, and few studies have tested the effects of caffeine consumption together with these 'novelty' ingredients," she said by email.

"On top of that, energy drinks are highly marketed to adolescent boys in ways that encourage risky behavior, including rapid and excessive consumption," she said. "As a result, emergency room visits by young people in connection with energy drinks are rising."

Any research that compares the effects of consuming energy drinks versus caffeine alone provides important evidence for public health advocates who have urged the energy drink companies to stop targeting youth with these potentially harmful products, Harris added.

More than 5,000 cases of people who got sick from energy drinks were reported to U.S. poison control centers between 2010 and 2013, and almost half of those cases were in children did not realize what they were drinking

Energy drinks typically contain high levels of sugar and at least as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. But the drinks also often tout the energy-boosting effects of a mix of other ingredients, ranging from taurine and l-carnitine, naturally occurring amino acids, to ginseng (a Chinese herb typically used in alternative medicine). But despite this "special blend" of ingredients, studies suggest energy drinks don't boost attention any better than a cup of coffee does.

Even just one 16-ounce energy drink can increase blood pressure and stress hormones and could put a healthy young adult at risk for heart damage, concludes a 2015 Mayo Clinic study.

Recent reports have shed light (er, horror) on the fact that there are millions of tiny, dead bugs living in our pillows. And yes, it's true. They're called dust mites - they're teeny, tiny arthropods, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. And they're munching on your dead skin cells.

"They don't bite people - they're not like ticks or fleas, although they're in that family," Dr. Gailen Marshall, an allergist and immunologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told TODAY. "The problem is that they go where there are a lot of skin scales. One of the best places in the world is your pillow. These little dust mites take those skin scales that come off of you and me and everyone else and eat them."

Dust mites are too small to see without a microscope, but they look like tiny, white bugs. When they die, dust mites' bodies (and their waste) is left behind, buried deep in our pillows, bedding, furniture, carpets and more. (Ugh...) And when we breathe that in, it can cause allergies.

Marshall called dust mites an "increasing problem" due to warmer temperatures, and said they can be especially problematic during allergy season, when people are already experiencing seasonal allergies.

Think runny or stuffy nose, itchy eyes and sneezing. That's right: typical allergy symptoms. So you might have a dust mite allergy, and not even know it. Given that we're already dealing with high levels of pollen, it's a good time to try to get rid of some of the dust mites currently living in your home. You probably won't be able to kill them all, but washing your bedding, including your pillows, is a good start.

"It's very difficult to kill (dust mites) completely," Marshall said. "You just kind of control them."

The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America recommends people wash their sheets and blankets once a week in hot water, invest in pillow and mattress covers and avoid wall-to-wall carpeting, if possible. Regular and careful dusting can help, too, Marshall said.

The place you should focus on the most? The bedroom. That's likely where you have the most skin scales lurking - in other words, food for the dust mites.

"If (patients) are persistent about controlling the amount of food and dust in the bedroom, we typically see symptoms get much better," Marshall said.