Adults and Acne Skin Disorder

Adults and Acne Skin Disorder

Have you ever thought that acne is a skin disorder that only affects teenagers? many people would answer this question with a "yes", while this is right in a great percentage of cases, there are several adults suffering from acne. Yes, it is true, acne can effect people into their forties and beyond. Then, what we will try with this article is to review the main aspects of adult acne and analyze some hard figures in terms of percentages. Moreover, describe the causes and symptoms of adult acne and list some treatments. However, it is always advisable visit your doctor for specialized recommendations.

Adult acne is a common but rarely discussed complaint that is thought to affect around 25% of adult men and up to 50% of adult women at some time in their adult lives as clinical researches have found out. Consequently, acne is more common in women than men and it can be developed even if you never suffered from acne as a child. Twenty five per cent of acne occurs for the first time over the age of 26 years and it is sometimes the result of stress and/or dehydration. Adult acne is also prevalent, especially among people in the age group of 25 to 40. Adult acne also tends to be more resilient, with deep, blind pimples that can last for weeks. Many visits to the dermatologist are due to Acne Vulgaris.

Although the triggers for adult acne are unknown, it is thought to have hormonal roots. Therefore, it can be caused by a hormonal imbalances, pollution, medications, or stress as stated above. Studies have shown a direct correlation between hormonal imbalances and outbreaks of acne in women ranging in age from 30 to 40 years, stress, alcohol and hot foods could aggravate the condition. However, adult acne can be fully controlled by various treatments.

Adult acne, which is really just the same as teenage acne, can start in women who have just given birth because of changes in hormone levels, and can appear in women who had little or no acne as teenagers. It can become very severe, and can lead to pustule and papule formation.

Adult acne care is different from adolescent acne care, as the hormones going through ones body are different. Therefore do not assume what you used to cure your teenage acne problem will cure your adult problems as well.

Certainly, adult Acne sounds funny, but nearly seventeen million people in the United States suffer from acne, corresponding 18% to adults, this makes acne the most common skin disease.

To sum up, it is generally accepted and documented that adult acne is a very common skin disorder in adults, it affects 25 per cent of men and 50 percent of women. Furthermore, it haven been proven the direct relation between hormonal imbalances and acne. Nevertheless, there are treatments available for this disease, and you should visit your doctor for advise.

Article From Article Health And Fitness

Homemade Pimple Treatments - Does it Beat OTC?

Homemade Pimple Treatments - Does it Beat OTC?

Rather than treating your pimples with harsh commercial products that can contain harmful chemicals, you can get rid of your pimples with a few simple ingredients from your kitchen.

Because OTC (over the counter) pimple remedies contain chemicals foreign to the skin, you can do more harm than good while using them. Your skin works hard to maintain the proper pH and OTC products often upset the complexion's delicate balance. When this happens, your glands often produce even more oil, resulting in more pimples. It's a vicious cycle that can usually be broken only by abandoning the medicines that keep your acne under control. But you have to do something, right? Look to your kitchen for everything you need to treat your pimples, gently and naturally!

Banishing pimples can be as easy as reaching for breakfast-oatmeal! Plain oatmeal mixed with water is a great facial scrub. It will exfoliate dead cells that clog the pores but is so gentle that it won't damage the skin or leave it raw as many commercial scrubs do. When you combine oatmeal with plain yogurt and honey, it becomes a good spot treatment for pimples. Simply leave it on the site until it dries and wash it off with warm water. The healing properties of oatmeal are actually good for your face and won't over-dry it.

A very effective treatment for pimples is to dab on some apple cider vinegar and let dry before rinsing it off with warm water. This is also good for the entire face. It will leave your complexion clean, soft and supple while making the pimples disappear.

Tea is wonderful beverage but also good for treating pimple. A few teabags steeped with two teaspoons of basil is an excellent way to rid yourself of pimples. After the mixture cools, apply it with cotton balls to the affected areas and let dry. Store the remainder in the refrigerator for future use. Using this treatment a few times a day will quickly rid your face of pimples.

You may be wondering how to keep your face clean if you abandon the commercial products you've been using. Salt water is the best cleanser for your skin! One half teaspoon of salt in a quart of water is the right mixture for most skin; use it at lukewarm temperature for a healthy, well-balanced complexion. The salt will rinse away excess oil and dry the skin just enough to discourage pimples while not over stimulating oil glands.

Vegetables are not only good for your body but also for your pimples. Rubbing a tomato wedge on your pimples will make them disappear, sometimes in less than twenty-four hours. Cucumber slices do the job a bit more slowly but are a less acidic method. You can also use potato slices. Raw garlic rubbed on the pimples a few times a day will also banish them just as well as the tomato but can be unpleasant unless you enjoy the scent of garlic.

Treating your pimples at home with natural ingredients is not only good for your skin, it's much kinder to the wallet!

Article From Article Health And Fitness

A Short History of Health Care

Jonathan Cohn shows how we got here.

By Timothy Noah


Any successful attempt to reform health care in the United States must accommodate two realities.

Reality 1: The current system is increasingly inaccessible to many poor and lower-middle-class people (about 47 million Americans lack health insurance, up from about 40 million in 2000); those lucky enough to have coverage are paying steadily more and/or receiving steadily fewer benefits; the increasingly complex warfare between insurers and hospitals over who pays the bills is gobbling up a great deal of money and resources; and the end result is that the United States pays roughly twice as much per capita for health care as Canada, France, and the United Kingdom yet experiences slightly lower life expectancy than those countries and significantly higher infant mortality. The problems inherent in the U.S. system of health care are literally killing people.

Reality 2: Open discussion of a "single-payer" system in which the government pays for and regulates health care is verboten within the political mainstream because it is presumed that Americans would never accept socialized medicine. Whatever solution arrived at by Congress and the president (in all likelihood, not this president) will have to harness market forces because, it's widely believed, markets will always outperform the dead hand of government. The lesson of "Hillarycare," a sweeping proposed health-care reform that died in Congress and may have delivered the House and Senate to the Republicans in 1994, weighs heavily on Democrats' minds (even though Hillarycare was not a socialized-medicine scheme but rather an attempt to reorder the private insurance market).

The trouble with the policy debate that's slowly beginning to emerge as the medical-industrial complex spins out of control is that it pays maximum deference to Reality 2 (political reality) and minimum deference to Reality 1 (the thing itself). This is an occupational hazard for mainstream political thinkers, who tend to define a pragmatist as someone who can find common ground between Republicans and Democrats no matter how irrelevant the compromise may be to the problem it's meant to solve. Thus in a recent column, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg noted with admiration that Sen. Ron Wyden, D.-Ore., author of an elaborate new market-based health-care reform bill, was so determined to "learn from previous Democratic mistakes" that he "read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times." But wouldn't it have made more sense to read The System just once or twice and then move on to a book focused not on Congress and the White House but on hospitals, insurance companies, doctors' offices, and the patients they're meant to serve?

Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at the New Republic, has written such a book, and I would urge Sen. Wyden to read it at least three times. Cohn's book, to be published next month, is Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Paid the Price. Each chapter of Cohn's book is devoted to one or two patient narratives that illuminate a particular dysfunction of the present medical system, and the chapters are arranged in such a way that the dysfunctions appear more or less in the order in which they first became significant national problems. The result is an 80-year chronology of repeated market failure, with each successive reform serving at best as temporary respite from the previous problem. Read it and weep. Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.

What we recognize as modern medicine, Cohn writes, began in the 1920s. That's when doctors and hospitals, having only during the previous decade learned enough about disease that they could be reliably helpful in treating sick people, began charging more than most individuals could easily pay. To close this gap, which worsened with the advent of the Great Depression, the administrator of Baylor Hospital in Dallas created a system that caught on elsewhere and eventually evolved into Blue Cross. The Blues were essentially nonprofit health insurers who served local community organizations like the Elks. In exchange for a tax break, Blue Cross organizations kept premiums reasonably low.

The success of the Blues persuaded commercial insurers, who initially considered medicine an unpromising market, to enter the field. Private insurers accelerated these efforts in the 1940s when businesses, seeking ways to get around wartime wage controls, began to compete for labor by offering health insurance. If government regulators had thought to freeze fringe benefits along with wages, we might have avoided making the workplace primarily responsible for supplying health insurance, a role that most people now agree was ill-advised. Instead, the government jumped on the bandwagon by exempting from the income tax company expenses associated with health care. (President Bush's proposal to alter this subsidy so that tax treatment of the self-employed is the same as for people who work for large companies—who currently enjoy an advantage—deserves praise for its progressivity. It would probably accelerate the business world's withdrawal from health insurance, which is inevitable. The trouble is, Bush offers no alternative to the workplace as a supplier of health insurance. Like Bush's plan to overthrow Saddam, it's great on the front end and disastrous on the back end.)

The Blues, in their early days, charged everyone the same premium, regardless of age, sex, or pre-existing conditions. This was partly because the Blues were quasi-philanthropic organizations, Cohn explains, and partly because the Blues were created by hospitals and therefore interested mainly in signing up potential hospital patients. They were sufficiently benevolent that when Harry Truman proposed a national health-care scheme, opponents were able to defeat it by arguing that the nonprofit sector had the problem well in hand. As private insurers entered the market, however, they rejiggered premiums by calculating relative risk, and avoided the riskiest potential customers altogether. To survive, the Blues followed suit; today, they no longer enjoy a tax advantage and are virtually indistinguishable from other health insurers. Meanwhile, large companies, which tend to employ significantly more young people than old people, began to self-insure. The combined result was that people who really needed health care had an increasingly difficult time affording, or even getting, health-care insurance.

As health-insurance costs rose during the 1970s and 1980s—driven both by improving medical technology and by the growing inefficiencies of the health-care system—health maintenance organizations, which had been around since the beginning, began to proliferate, along with other managed-care schemes. Like the Blues, HMOs became victims of their own success. Initially they were mainly nonprofit, but once again businesses spotted an opportunity and for-profit HMOs displaced nonprofit HMOs. (According to Cohn, 12 percent of the market was served by for-profits in 1981; by 1997, that was more like 65 percent.) With their bottom-line orientation, the for-profit HMOs were necessarily more aggressive about denying treatments.

Managed care kept cost increases in check for a while during the 1990s, but eventually costs started creeping up again, creating the current crisis. Today employers are reducing or eliminating outright health-care benefits for employees; hospitals are consolidating and becoming less accommodating to low-income patients as they seek to push back against insurers; and a shrinking portion of the population has any health insurance at all. The Bush administration has encouraged the growth of health savings accounts, which in the guise of providing greater consumer choice create a confusing array of alternatives that disguise a further reduction in coverage and more cost-shifting away from the young and healthy toward the old and sick. The overall trend—the gift of an increasingly market-driven health-care system—is to undermine the very idea that the cost of illness should be spread out among the general population, healthy and unhealthy alike. In this sense, the private health-care market is too efficient. Assigning health care costs to sick people is what the market wants to do.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country. But they've made a complete hash of the health-care system. Doesn't that reality deserve more than passing respect?

Health Care

Health care, or healthcare, is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well being through the services offered by the medical, nursing, and allied health professions. Health care embraces all the goods and services designed to promote health, including “preventive, curative and palliative interventions, whether directed to individuals or to populations”. The organised provision of such services may constitute a health care system. This can include specific governmental organizations such as, in the UK, the National Health Service or a cooperation across the National Health Service and Social Services as in Shared Care. Before the term "health care" became popular, English-speakers referred to medicine or to the health sector and spoke of the treatment and prevention of illness and disease.

In most developed countries and many developing countries health care is provided to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. The National Health Service, established in 1948 by Clement Atlee's Labour government in the United Kingdom, were the world's first universal health care system provided by government and paid for from general taxation. Alternatively, compulsory government funded health insurance with nominal fees can be provided, as in Italy. Other examples are Medicare in Australia, established in the 1970s by the Labor government, and by the same name Medicare was established in Canada between 1966 and 1984. Universal health care contrasts to the systems like health care in the United States or South Africa, though South Africa is one of the many countries attempting health care reform. The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care.

Industry

The health care industry is considered an industry or profession which includes peoples' exercise of skill or judgment or the providing of a service related to the preservation or improvement of the health of individuals or the treatment or care of individuals who are injured, sick, disabled, or infirm. The delivery of modern health care depends on an expanding group of trained professionals coming together as an interdisciplinary team.

Consuming over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations, health care can form an enormous part of a country's economy. In 2003, health care costs paid to hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers and other components of the health care system, consumed 16.3 percent of the GDP of the United States, the largest of any country in the world. For the United States, the health share of gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to hold steady in 2006 before resuming its historical upward trend, reaching 19.5 percent of GDP by 2016. In 2001, for the OECD countries the average was 8.4 percent with the United States (13.9%), Switzerland (10.9%), and Germany (10.7%) being the top three.

Systems

Purely private enterprise health care systems are comparatively rare. Where they exist, it is usually for a comparatively well-off subpopulation in a poorer country with a poorer standard of health care–for instance, private clinics for a small, wealthy expatriate population in an otherwise poor country[citation needed]. But there are countries with a majority-private health care system with residual public service (see Medicare, Medicaid). The other major models are public insurance systems. A Social security health care model is where workers and their families are insured by the State. A publicly funded health care model is where the residents of the country are insured by the State. Within this branch is Single-payer health care, which describes a type of financing system in which a single entity, typically a government run organisation, acts as the administrator (or "payer") to collect all health care fees, and pay out all health care costs. Some advocates of universal health care assert that single-payer systems save money that could be used directly towards health care by reducing administrative waste. In practice this means that the government collects taxes from the public, businesses, etc., creates an entity to administer the supply of health care and then pays health care professionals. A single-payer universal health care system will actually save money through reduced bureaucratic administration costs. Social health insurance is where the whole population or most of the population is a member of a sickness insurance company. Most health services are provided by private enterprises which act as contractors, billing the government for patient care. In almost every country with a government health care system a parallel private system is allowed to operate. This is sometimes referred to as two-tier health care. The scale, extent, and funding of these private systems is very variable.

A traditional view is that improvements in health result from advancements in medical science. The medical model of health focuses on the eradication of illness through diagnosis and effective treatment. In contrast, the social model of health places emphasis on changes that can be made in society and in people's own lifestyles to make the population healthier. It defines illness from the point of view of the individual's functioning within their society rather than by monitoring for changes in biological or physiological signs.