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pain management?

  • Posted on August 11, 2010 at 11:20 pm

had a motorcycle accident last April – fractured wrist/leg/etc….developed premature arthritis from muscle tissue healing around fractures from accident and impact to body – my body has been working overtime using other parts to compensate for disabled parts – diagnoised with 40% loss of function in hand/wrist, since then, pain has been unbearable at times. Working with docs on pain meds – now on Naproxen twice a day and Percocet twice a day – it’s working, but personally i’m concerned because it’s the only way to function – would this be considered an addiction???? or a lifelong pain management step in a better direction. Without any meds, I can’t move, stiff, sore, cry in pain – I’m 38 yrs old, was extremely active before the accident, work full time, one daughter, one husband, 3 acres of land to care for – full time all around care giver. Any suggestions or alternatives? or stick to what works for now????
went through intensive physical therapy, no improvement, have a counselor to handle the emotional strain. Saw a chiropractor (lots of smoke and mirrors for me – pain intensified after a few visits)

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Management Has its Own Pain: Take Care of Your Back

  • Posted on January 8, 2010 at 11:24 pm

When you traded your hammer and heavy equipment for a clip board and PDA, I bet you thought those days of sore backs and strained muscles were over. Come to find out that stress and using your muscles to fight gravity can be pretty hard on your body too.

9 out of 10 adults will experience back pain at some point in their lives, and 5 out of 10 working adults have back pain EVERY year .
The American Academy of Family Physicians
Retrieved March 12, 2007

Whether you are a construction manager, project manager or design engineer, the fact is that leading a less active life than you once did, can create real problems for you and your back, in particular. Your back works a lot like a cantilever bridge, where your spine is the truss and your muscles and tendons are the suspension spans holding things in place. When you sit or stand for long periods, your muscles and tendons are forced to hold your head, neck, arms and shoulders in place far longer than they should. Your “spans” get overworked, tired and weak. And they become susceptible or injury.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Within your body, there is something called  “Fascia” – a protective sheath that covers ever cell of your body, every muscle, every tendon, etc. As you age and suffer injuries on the job, the fascia tightens around the injury areas. That’s why you sometimes feel knots or tenderness from an injury you suffered five years ago. And if you don’t do something to stretch and loosen the fascia, that tender spot continues to tighten up and the fascia (along with muscles and tendons) gets overstretched in some areas and shortens in others.

You may begin to hunch over, you may only be able to turn you head 45 degrees (90+ is what the average healthy person can turn) and you may feel general tightness and tenderness in your back and neck. Not too bad you may be thinking. But if you compound that with your age (over 30??) and the stress of managing a large job and crew, you may see your back go out at just the wrong time – like the week construction is supposed to be completed. Or the day your son or daughter graduates.

How to Stop the Worst from Happening

If much of the above sounds all too familiar, the first thing you need to do is to get your back healthy. The second thing you need to do is to incorporate regular exercise and stretching into your daily routine.

Step 1: Visit my office or that of any SI practitioner. The first that we will do is to discuss how you spend your day – standing, sitting, dealing with stress-inducing issues, etc. Then I will design a structural therapy and bodywork schedule for you that will relieve the immediate pain and tenderness in your back, neck, head, etc. Then by means of a multi-session program, I will soften and strengthen the fascia, muscles and tendons in you back. When you have completed your program, you will feel a range of motion and strength you’d forgotten you had. And you will be ready for

Step 2: Exercise, stretching and strength training.

“Diagnosis and Management of Acute Low Back Pain”; American Academy of Family Physicians. Retrieved March 12, 2007. http://www.aafp.org/afp/20000315/1779.html

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EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER RELATION MANAGEMENT IN INSURANCE SECTOR-NEED OF THE HOUR

  • Posted on January 7, 2010 at 5:20 am

INTRODUCTION:

 India with about 200 million middle class household shows a huge untapped potential for players in the insurance industry. Saturation of markets in many developed economies has made the Indian market even more attractive for global insurance majors. The insurance sector in India has come to a position of very high potential and competitiveness in the market.  Indians, have always seen life insurance as a tax saving device, are now suddenly turning to the private sector that are providing them new products and variety for their choice.

Consumers remain the most important centre of the insurance sector. After the entry of the foreign players the industry is seeing a lot of competition and thus improvement of the customer service in the industry. Computerization of operations and updating of technology has become imperative in the current scenario. Foreign players are bringing in international best practices in service through use of latest technologies. The insurance agents still remain the main source through which insurance products are sold. The concept is very well established in the country like India but still the increasing use of other sources is imperative. At present the distribution channels that are available in the market are listed below.

Direct selling ·

Corporate agents ·

Group selling ·

Brokers and cooperative societies ·

Banc assurance ·

Customers have tremendous choice from a large variety of products from pure term (risk) insurance to unit-linked investment products. Customers are offered unbundled products with a variety of benefits as riders from which they can choose. More customers are buying products and services based on their true needs and not just traditional money back policies, which is not considered very appropriate for long-term protection and savings. There is lots of saving and investment plans in the market. However, there are still some key new products yet to be introduced – e.g. health products.

The rural consumer is now exhibiting an increasing propensity for insurance products. A research conducted exhibited that the rural consumers are willing to dole out anything between Rs 3,500 and Rs 2,900 as premium each year. In the insurance the awareness level for life insurance is the highest in rural India, but the consumers are also aware about motor, accidents and cattle insurance. In a study conducted by MART the results showed that nearly one third said that they had purchased some kind of insurance with the maximum penetration skewed in favor of life insurance. The study also pointed out the private companies have huge task to play in creating awareness and credibility among the rural populace. The perceived benefits of buying a life policy range from security of income bulk return in future, daughter’s marriage, children’s education and good return on savings, in that order, the study adds.

There is an evolutionary change in the technology that has revolutionized the entire insurance sector. Insurance industry is a data-rich industry, and thus, there is a need to use the data for trend analysis and personalization.

With increased competition among insurers, service has become a key issue. Moreover, customers are getting increasingly sophisticated and tech-savvy. People today don’t want to accept the current value propositions, they want personalized interactions and they look for more and more features and add ones and better service.

The insurance companies today undergo for more and more personalized approach in handling the customer. Today managing the customer intelligently is very critical for the insurer especially in the very competitive environment. Companies need to apply different set of rules and treatment strategies to different customer segments. However, to personalize interactions, insurers are required to capture customer information in an integrated system.

With the explosion of Website and greater access to direct product or policy information, there is a need to developing better techniques to give customers a truly personalized experience. Personalization helps organizations to reach their customers with more impact and to generate new revenue through cross selling and up selling activities. To ensure that the customers are receiving personalized information, many organizations are incorporating knowledge database-repositories of content that typically include a search engine and let the customers locate the all document and information related to their queries of request for services. Customers can hereby use the knowledge database to mange their products or the company information and invoices, claim records, and histories of the service inquiry. These products also may be able to learn from the customer’s previous knowledge database and to use their information when determining the relevance to the customers search request

There is a probability of a spurt in employment opportunities. A number of web-sites are coming up on insurance, a few financial magazines exclusively devoted to insurance and also a few training institutes being set up hurriedly. Life insurance has today become a mainstay of any market economy since it offers plenty of scope for garnering large sums of money for long periods of time.

A well-regulated life insurance industry which moves with the times by offering its customers tailor-made products to satisfy their financial needs is, therefore, essential if we desire to progress towards a worry-free future. Efficient customer services by the insurance sector will enhance the performance of its  business.

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6 Effective Stress Management Tips – Success Tips From the Personality Development Experts

  • Posted on January 5, 2010 at 11:24 am

Exercise. Amen for endorphins. Believe me; they’ve helped me many days with my perspective. You need to understand that Stress and health are closely linked. It is one of the most effective ways of reducing stress and physical stress in particular. If you have to work out, then go take a brisk walk and gets that blood flowing. It isn’t about working out to lose weight — it’s about being healthy and staying sane. Reducing stress can be more often a more complicated process than it seems to be. Exercise can not only keep individuals healthy but also help them effectively manage physical stress. It really works as a stress buster and gives you stress relief.

Eat the real stuff. Crappy food (fast, processed, and loaded with sugar) doesn’t help your chemical brain and body in reducing stress. It does not help you manage physical stress either. Living food, real food, helps support your mind and body while it’s trying to deal with the million things coming its way. Having healthy eating habits can help a lot in Reducing stress and it gives you stress relief. Stress and health can also be looked at this way. Every time I reach for the chocolate; I’m looking to feel something from it. Don’t get me wrong — if it’s just a little here and there because I enjoy the taste of it, great. But if I’m using it the minute I feel overwhelmed, then that’s when that food is no longer OK to eat. It doesn’t make the problem go away, and then I just feel bad about eating the food to pacify myself. Grab green food instead. Put things in your mouth that are going to support your immune function and keep you level headed. And that is going to help you reduce physical stress.

Notice. Try not to let the stress (physical stress/mental stress) overtake you. Recognize the situations that cause the stress and notice them coming your way. First step towards reducing stress is to be aware that it is coming your way. In that way only you would be able to gain stress relief. Stress and health are very much antagonistic to each other. Hence stress and health need very much to be taken care of. Where there is stress there cannot be health. So it would not only help you deal with the stress better but would also help you in reducing stress and handling stressful situations better. You have a better shot at fending off the full effects of the stress when you can anticipate it.

Get it off your chest. Talk to a friend or partner about the stress. Keeping the stress to yourself increases the level of physical stress you undergo and may not help you in reducing stress. Stress and health cannot be managed effectively in that way then. Sometimes just getting it off your chest can help unload some of the burden and would go a long way in reducing stress and significantly bring it to a lower level. Keep your sense of humour. If you do have the chance to talk about the physical stress that you have been going through, try to see the irony and humour in the wacky bits. Since It is one of the easiest ways of reducing stress and gives a lot of stress relief but still people find it difficult practising it. You check your stress and health to significant extent this way. I think someone is dead in the water once they lose their sense of humour. So staying humorous is one of the most effective ways of reducing stress, physical stress in particular and relieving tension.

Stay grateful. My daughter has large lungs and verbal skills she likes to display. Just when I start to wishfully think about her being quiet, I remind myself to be grateful that she can talk to me at all. Well, Amen that you have the means and the health to even be able to wrestle with the idea of going to work out. Make a habit of saying thank you. You will notice the sunny spots a lot more often, and not just the gray skies and storms. May be you would be able to look into your stress and health better. May be in that way you would be reducing stress and reducing stress in a cheerful way and stay cheerful.

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Atlanta Anger Management Counselor Reveals Tips For Winning

  • Posted on January 4, 2010 at 4:07 pm

There are many people that suffer from anger management issues. Most of the time we are thinking of the person that acts with aggression and rage as the only person that suufers from anger management issues, but that is not the case.

The family of such an individual suufers from this just as much as the person themselves does. The reason being is because generally when  a person with anger management issues gets angry or becomes enraged they direct that energy and force towards the very people  that they love. Why is this so?

There are several reasons why this is the case and we will try to enlighten you about some of them. The first one is based on the fact that a person that has these emotions engulfed within them feels the necessity to show their love in a manner that makes them feel better about themselves. It is hard to show love for yourself when you are the one that needs to be loved. Therefore, showing love to others is almost out of the question.

People are out of control because they have low self-esteem, suggests Marilyn J. Sorensen, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who wrote Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem. High taxes, lying politicians, traffic jams and exhausting schedules all are culprits, she says. “The demands are endless and people have no time to themselves or quality time with their families.” Some people feel powerless, she continues. “Many work all their lives and have little to show for it.” Those with no money to invest don’t benefit from the booming stock market; indeed, they “feel even more like they have missed out; they feel further behind and know they can never catch up.”

The Florida academic distinguishes between feeling anger and expressing anger. As bad as expressing anger is proving to be for the society at large, Speilberger’s studies show anger turned inward, which leads to depression, has deeply destructive physical consequences leading to elevated blood pressure and hypertension, heart attack and stroke.

If keeping your cool is so good for you, why do people lose it? Because, for one thing, “the promise of service never equals reality,” notes C. Leslie Charles, who recently wrote, Why Is Everyone so Cranky? and has made it a mission to stamp out anger with her “cranky buster” buttons and T-shirts. “We are overwhelmed, overworked, overscheduled and overspent,” she declares. “We are a nation living on the edge.”

“It’s what we do with our anger or how we express it that matters” Charles says. “There is a healthy way to express anger, such as Candy Lightner did when her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. She started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We should have a road-rage advocate group.” Instead, people dwell on what they don’t have, Charles says. Our “expectation machine” with its impossible-to-deliver promises insists that life is like sports: “There are winners and losers, and if you are not a winner guess what you are?”

Our crankiness, she writes, is the “natural by-product of our social compulsion to drive the right car, live in the right home in the right area with all the right furnishings, have the right job, send our kids to the right day care or school, wear the right clothes and accessories, belong to the right clubs and go to the right vacation spots.” Believing that having the best means we are the best leads to the anxiety that results from financial instability. “Many of us are so busy trying to create the right life that we’ve turned our existence into a nightmare of debt”

The Violence Institute uses Adlerian psychology, which presumes that people “overcompensate” for feelings of inferiority and inadequacy in childhood. “Not only do we feel inferior and inadequate to cope in childhood, but it turns out we blame ourselves. That will tie you up in knots,” says Messer, “and it will give us preexisting anger in our bloodstream so that all it will take is 2 ounces to spill us over.” The only people to escape this, he notes, “are American citizens with perfect parents.”

The young shooters, like everyone else, have been suppressing anger for years, says Messer. “When they cannot take the pressure any more, all of a sudden, 19 and behold, they turn it outward. What did you think they would do?”

Recent studies show it may not only be the angry child we need to be concerned about, but also coworkers. Take a look at the people in nearby cubicles and remember that while homicides committed during robberies declined during the nineties, killings by coworkers rose dramatically.

Donald Gibson, a professor at the Yale University School of Management, says the recent spate of workplace violence is not surprising. Coauthor of The Experience of Anger at Work: Lessons From the Chronically Angry, Gibson notes that nearly 25 percent of respondents to a 1996 Gallup telephone survey of 1,000 adults indicated that they were “generally at least somewhat angry at work.” Much of that discontent is coming from the East Coast, where 12 percent of the respondents called themselves quite angry, compared with 6 percent in the Midwest, 4 percent in the South and 3 percent in the West.

These are just a few of the problems that are noted in our society as we continue to struggle with anger management .

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The Truth about Stress and Hypnotherapy for Stress Management

  • Posted on January 3, 2010 at 10:24 am

How often do you find yourself wondering what is the best possible way to reduce the stress in your life? You are just an average person with a normal life, decent work hours, and a family to care for; yet you can’t help but court stress in every aspect of your life. Be it presentations at work, failing to be at your daughter’s fancy dress competition, or forgetting your anniversary…you seem to be meeting stress at every corner. And you have been spending hours mulling over what is the best possible way to reduce stress – have you ever thought of trying hypnotherapy for stress management?

Stress has slowly seeped into every aspect of our life, and we often find ourselves blaming the fast paced life, the rat race and anything else that we can think of. We often think of stress as a negative force, something which will lead to nervous breakdowns and heart attacks. While I counsel my clients during hypnotherapy for stress management sessions, I often tell them that they should learn to look at stress not just as a negative factor; the truth is that stress can be a positive force as well. Don’t believe me? Well, look at this way…it is stress which drives us to do better, to put in our best efforts into anything we do. It is stress that pushes us to work towards our goals or helps us get out of a rut. We often increase our stress by stressing about stress! Sounds confusing, well it is.

Stress as a force confounds our brain, and hinders our ability to think straight. That’s why we end up doing stupid things when we are stressed. Have you ever found yourself wondering why you fought with your spouse/partner while at work; the issue that you fought upon seems trivial to you now. This is the classic byproduct of stress; most people who are stressed out tend to do things without thinking them through, their thinking abilities are blocked either by anxiety, fear or confusion. It’s like the wiper on your mind’s windshield suddenly fails to function. Hypnotherapy for stress management enables you to understand stress for what it is; by working on the rules of relaxation and positive reinforcements, hypnosis helps you get to a calmer state of mind where you begin to see things clearly again.

Hypnotherapy for stress management also makes you realize the cause of the stress and slowly nudges you towards dealing with those causes. With the help of techniques and auto suggestion, it instructs your subconscious mind to deal with a situation better. Let’s face it, we live in a very hectic world and all of us seem to be running around for something or the other. More often than not, we fail to take out time for ourselves from our busy lives. We don’t find the time to relax, to put up our feet up and forget every care in the world. We get stuck into a routine which seems impenetrable. The first way that hypnotherapy for stress management helps you during stressful times is that it provides the perfect opportunity to relax. It lets you drift into a comfort zone where you rediscover yourself; the hypnosis guides you towards using stress as a positive force in your life. It also helps you remember things that make you happy, and helps your mind retreat to these happy images and places every time you are negatively stressed out.

The antidote to stress is relaxation; and hypnotherapy for stress management gives you the perfect excuse to relax. So go ahead, they hypnotherapy and relax away your stresses!

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