Botox Wrinkles And Job Insecurity

Botox, once the ?darling? of the celebrity crowd has moved front and center into the business world where daring men and women go to great lengths to disguise frown lines, age lines and anything resembling Mother Nature?s wicked march across their faces.

Why? They know their jobs require them to look fresh and healthy; old, deeply lined, tired, faces are becoming pass? because ideas coming from someone wearing an out of shape, soft, sagging face can equate to old, stale ideas in the business arena. Botox, once used primarily by women is now used by more and more men as they, too, realize the importance of maintaining a more youthful appearance. Their jobs may just depend on it.

Some say Botox is a wonder drug that smoothes wrinkles and indeed it does; however there are a few drawbacks that are a concern. According to the Independent, a London based newspaper, ?Increasingly, people who have used or considered Botox are worried about possible side-effects, including developing fresh wrinkles as they change expressions to compensate for the paralysis in parts of their faces.?

Wait! Develop fresh wrinkles??? Dr. David Becker, professor of dermatology, Cornell Medical College, issued a caution linking Botox injections to development of new wrinkles when users recreate facial expressions. The paralyzed muscles cannot respond so nearby muscles are automatically summoned. The result? New wrinkles. Oh dear.

Botox has been used since the early 1990?s to treat lines and wrinkles associated with the motion of underlying facial muscles. Expressions such as excessive brow movements can cause horizontal lines, eye squints produce crows feet and subtle sagging of the facial muscles can make skin drape strangely

Botox cannot stop the sagging muscles; in fact, Dr Michelle Copeland, a plastic surgeon in NY said, ??Because Botox wears off, more frequent injections are required to maintain its effects or the patient?s face will return to its wrinkly state.?

And what if you are wearing a ?severe/angry facial expression? that after botox develops into a frozen, smooth, plastic look? Does that work to your advantage? Perhaps. Your facial expressions are who you are; take those away and you just may resemble a Stepford wife; however, there are those users who swear that having a subdued expression has helped them with intense negotiations and other business related circumstances, calling the poker faced look a ?competitive edge?.

Just remember:

1) Botox can result in the development of fine lines and wrinkles in other areas of the face.
2) Botox requires more painful injections to maintain results.
3) Botox is costly; treatments range from $200-$600.
4) Botox can result in undesirable side effects including allergic reactions, difficulty breathing, unusual muscle weakness, chest pain, headaches and dizziness.

What if you could avoid needles and scalpels and look younger? What if you could be in charge of the aging process and look healthier? What if you could manipulate and retrain your facial muscles to look and act younger without resorting to expensive, barbaric measures that are risky and dangerous? Well, you can!

Muscles in the face can be retrained when they are exercised. Your forehead muscle can tighten, crows feet can diminish and your face can look firm and healthy without any risk from costly injections or fillers. And actually if you think about it, facial exercise makes sense medically. After all, when you exercise your body, you're going to tone and tighten the muscles in your body. So why not apply the same principles to your face? If you continue to exercise your face, you will look substantially younger indefinitely.

Cynthia Rowland is widely recognized as an expert in all natural facial fitness with over thirty years experience in health & beauty related fields. She has appeared on The View, Fit TV, HGTV and other popular shows. This author, speaker and television personality is leading the crusade to keep men and women looking vibrantly younger through natural techniques without spending their children?s inheritance.

Cynthia Rowland

I Save Faces
http://www.cynthiarowland.com/FMED.htm

Strengthen Your Back With Taijiquan

There are a few traditional exercises which you can still do to strengthen your back, namely, sit ups, cross sit ups, leg raises and back extensions. However, many who eventualy develop the 6 pack, or the front abdominal muscles, may not be able to demonstrate co-ordinated spinal control. As always, the rule of them of thumb is to do these exercises in moderation. Having a strong back will improve your spinal stability. This stabilisation is achieved by working on your deeper trunk muscles. Hence, we need to turn our attention to exercises that require the control of deep abdominal muscles and good mind-body co-ordination.

So, how do we train up our trunks for starters?

This is quite simply done. You don't even need the gym. And you can improve your posture and back alignment this very moment, wherever you are!

Just imagine a string pulling you up from the central tip of your head, like those puppets. This can be a powerful visualization if you have the discipline to enforce it throughout the day.

Then, sitting where you are, do a head roll a couple of times, and rotate your shoulders a couple of times. You will find the tension considerably reduced. Finish off by stretching your arms up over your head, gripping your hands together at the apex.

Right. Next question. For those of us who want to take back strengthening a step further, where do we go from here?

You will likely find that Taijiquan (Tai Chi or Taiji) can address this rather satisfactorily,if not, effectively, for most of us.

Most Taijiquan styles require you to develop an upright posture when practicing the forms. You can do this easily if you focus your eyes on a level. Try not to look down at your feet or the ground, you won't find any gold there. For every movement you learn, you will have to find your best postulation, without hunching, slouching and the like. In effect, you get training in centering, or finding your center of stability.

By constantly monitoring the uprightness of your posture for each move, you are essentially building up your trunk muscles. When you train up strong and stable trunk muscles, they help provide a stable frame allowing our arms and legs to move more efficiently, thereby reducing the risk of injuries. This is very much the case in Chenjiagou Taijiquan which emphasizes the trunk/waist area as a central pivot and force center. The stronger your trunk muscles, the more efficiently you are able to transfer force between your upper and lower limbs. As your efficiency increases, you can generate more power into each stroke, each movement that is executed.

In Chenjiagou Taijiquan, you will learn to maintain a stable trunk as you execute each movement, by keeping the posture as upright as possible relative to the ground. By focusing and adhering to this requirement, you will find that you need to draw upon collective muscles all throughout the lower abdominal area, whilst ensuring that you do not automatically tense your shoulders in order to keep the stance. You won't be able to do all this in a magical instance, of course. It is through regular training, by trial and error as you practice to find your most comfortable posture, you will discover your optimal body position for each movement. You will know when you have found the best angles because you will be able to hold a postulation effortlessly! That is also when all your body lines are connected in a continuous, unbroken flow.

A daily dose - alright, for those who can't make it everyday - a regular dose of Chenjiagou Taijiquan practice will help you to develop your own proper breathing technique that is co-ordinated with your movements. When you have eventually found your own breathing rhythm, you will not get breathless during your practice. Taijiquan can be a wonderful art which trains segmental control. The routines have been created so that you practice along progressive stages. Each stage focuses on a different area of the human body, such that you will benefit from total body conditioning. The routines require spinal flexibility at the trunk, segmental control of the spine (precision), a continuous flow of movement and centering (through balancing on foot centres).

With persistent, proper training and feedback from a qualified instructor, you should be able to transfer this control into your daily functional tasks such as standing, walking and other sports activity. You will find your body automatically seeks to adjust itself into an optimal position for easy balance. I think we all agree that this is an extremely valuable reflex to nurture.

Watch a short demo of Chenjiagou Taijiquan, the 5 Element set now.

Jasmine Bu
20th Generation Chenjiagou Taijiquan Disciple. I'm also a mother of 2 kids.

Do stop by my website at The World of Taijiquan if you would like to learn more about how to re-balance your internal body systems whilst getting healthy.

Understanding More about Pain Management

Pain management is a problem with which contemporary medicine has been grappling for some time. There is nearly always a trade-off: you may not feel the pain, but you remain dependent upon chiropractic treatments, painkillers or massage, stupefied by muscle relaxants, or toxified by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) -- or worse: physically impaired by neuro-surgical interventions and injections of neurotoxins that take away the natural capacities of an intact nervous system. Meanwhile, the tissue inflammation and damage to joints, no longer being reported to you by pain, continues to develop. There is an effective alternative, new and radically different from conventional approaches.

Viewpoints about Pain

Whereas nearly everyone recognizes that chronic pain is a sign of something wrong, modern medical science has little to offer for certain kinds of pain -- notably musculo-skeletal pain and headaches. Medical science thinks almost entirely in terms of intervention -- either surgical or chemical (drugs); it overlooks the body's natural self-regulating mechanisms, which sometimes go awry and cause the pain to begin with -- two examples being headaches and back pain.

This potential to change how ones body functions has to do with conditioning. Perhaps fifty percent of musculo-skeletal pain comes from an excessively tight muscles -- the result of injury and prolonged stress (long term emotional tension). Muscles go into contraction during pain and stress. This state of contraction cannot effectively be controlled by drugs or countered by surgery because it has to do with a brain-level reaction. This kind of brain-level reaction is discussed in greater depth in another article.

Once this kind of reaction pattern forms, as during prolonged periods of healing, it tends to persist, sometimes for decades, unless and until the person does something deliberate to change them; these tensions do not heal because there is no damage. The neuromuscular system is functioning quite well, but in an aberrated way!

It is for that reason that chemical and physical interventions are ineffective: the person does not have a medical problem; they have a conditioning problem.

More Details

Let's be more specific: How can tight muscles create pain?

Ever lifted something heavy for more than a few seconds? Don't your muscles start to burn? Imagine what muscles must feel like when contracted 24 hours a day! And more: consider what tight muscles cause in the joints they cross: compression. Might not relentless compression cause joint pain? What about nerves trapped between tight muscles and bone: ever had a pinched nerve?

That mechanism accounts for a long list of familiar complaints: back pain, muscular pain, headaches, scoliosis, TMJ, carpal tunnel syndrome (in many cases), tennis elbow (medial epicondylitis), knee pain, foot pain, and certain other conditions.

Next question: What is the universal response to shock or injury? When you get hurt what's the first thing that happens. You tighten up, don't you?

Might that not explain the pains and stiffness of aging? -- more opportunities for shock and/or injury as time passes?

So, A Conditioning Problem, Not a Medical Problem

Because of the recognized hazards of drug dependency, physicians are sometimes reluctant to prescribe even painkilling drugs and prefer to tell the patient to get used to the pain.

In extreme cases, however, the neurosurgeon steps in and cuts nerves, or the orthopedist replaces a joint (sometimes necessary and successful at alleviating pain, sometimes, not). Cortisone may be injected to reduce inflammation or botulism toxin injected to paralyze muscles. These kinds of measures often miss the point: the person is in pain because they are too tight; joints degenerated because of too much muscle-induced pressure; and muscles are too tight because the brain has become conditioned to hold them that way.

In that case, answer is not surgery or drugs; it is to change the conditioning by which a person holds themselves too tight -- a process that falls more into the realm of learning than of medical intervention.

Deal With the Problem As It Is.

To change the tension level of muscles requires more than stretching or massaging; it requires a learning process that affects the brain, which controls the muscular system. Such a learning process is referred to in some circles as somatic education. Somatic education systematically uses special movement training techniques to improve awareness and control of the muscular system. Significant results come relatively quickly, and when they do, the benefits are second nature and require no special attention in daily life, other than a brief, morning-refreshment routine to purge out the accumulated effects of daily stresses.

A system of sensory awareness and movement education (brain training), Hanna Somatic Education?, has been developed that restores freedom from numerous forms of musculo-skeletal and stress related pain.

For a list of conditions helped and how they are helped, click here. For more articles and information on self-help programs, click one of the links shown on this page and, upon arrival at the page, look for PURCHASE in the blue navigation bar at top. Free previews of programs are available from that page.

Lawrence Gold served for two years on staff at the Wellness and Rehabilitation Center of Watsonville Community Hospital, California and for two years as part of the Novato Institute training team for new practitioners. As part of the team, he presented Hanna Somatic Education at Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California.