Women have unique oral health concerns. Changing hormone levels during your menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause can raise your risk of problems in your mouth, teeth, or gums. Health issues such as diabetes can also affect your oral health. Regular brushing, flossing, and dentist visits can help prevent disease in your mouth and the rest of your body. Oral health is the health of your mouth, including your teeth, gums, throat, and the bones around the mouth. Oral health problems, such as gum disease, might be a sign that you have other health problems. Gum diseases are infections caused by plaque, which is a sticky film of bacteria that forms on your teeth. If left untreated, the bacteria in plaque can destroy the tissue and bone around your teeth, leading to tooth loss. The bacteria can travel throughout your body and make you sick. Infections in your mouth can also…

Shannon Lee Miller Falconetti, is an American former artistic gymnast and cancer survivor, whose survival story shows the beauty of focus and positive mindset. The seven-time Olympic medalist stated that lessons she learned while training for gymnastics competitions helped her endure the rigors of treatment for ovarian cancer. “A huge part of my success as an athlete was that I had the mental game. To get through the toughest moments of treatment I relied on goal setting and keeping that positive mentality.” Shannon Miller was thirty-three (33) years old when she found out she had ovarian cancer. It was in the fall of 2010 and she had almost skipped her regular women’s health exam. She was a nursing mother to a year old Rocco and had recently founded her company, Shannon Miller Lifestyle: Health and Fitness for Women, and just felt too busy with life and work to go for…

An autoimmune disease is a condition in which your immune system mistakenly attacks your body.

The immune system normally guards against germs like bacteria and viruses. When it senses these foreign invaders, it sends out an army of fighter cells to attack them. Normally, the immune system can tell the difference between foreign cells and your own cells. In an autoimmune disease, the immune system mistakes part of your body — like your joints or skin — as foreign. It releases proteins called autoantibodies that attack healthy cells. Some autoimmune diseases target only one organ. Type 1 diabetes damages the pancreas. Other diseases, like lupus, affect the whole body.

By: Eruke Ojuederie While world women advocate for equal rights for women and the fight against gender violence across regions, a vital part of this discourse has failed to be addressed. Though part of the umbrella name gender violence, acid attacks have remained rampant most especially in developing nations with little or no measures put in place to curb this human atrocity. Of what use will the fight against gender violence be if it does not protect those prone to attacks for speaking their minds on issues of the heart? Acid attacks are violent assaults aimed at destroying some portions of the victims’ body. In most cases, this comes as a result of a disagreement or as is the case with most women, is the punishment for rejection and turned-down advances – usually sexual. Those who suffer from this attack face a risk of blindness, permanent scars, and sometimes death…

By: John Naish Sharyn Mackay and John Pattison belong to an extraordinary club – people told they have terminal cancer only for their tumours to disappear inexplicably, to the astonishment of patient and doctor alike. It’s tempting to see these stories as medical miracles. But drug companies are hard on the trail of a more rational answer – that the tumours were ‘killed off’ by the patient’s own immune system – and are developing new therapies to harness this power. Sharyn knew there was something wrong when she began suffering pain in the right side of her stomach in April 2003. She was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour on her kidney, which proved so rare that the doctors at Craigavon Area Hospital in Northern Ireland sent samples of it for examination by specialists in London, Glasgow, and Harvard. Sharyn Mackay with husband William and daughter Olivia. ‘I wasn’t going…

Sometimes a heart attack is not just a heart attack, but the result of spontaneous tearing in the coronary artery wall. The artery wall has three layers and when a tear occurs, blood is able to pass through the innermost layer and become trapped and bulge inward. This narrows or blocks the artery and can cause a heart attack because blood flow cannot reach the heart muscle. Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) is an uncommon occurrence, but because it occurs spontaneously, it’s important to recognize the symptoms and get treatment immediately. Dr. Naesha Parks began her journey with SCAD in 2008, just ten days after giving birth to her son. Her doctors discovered that she had a coronary artery dissection which required open heart surgery. Here’s her amazing story: “If you have a young patient who doesn’t show atherosclerosis in the arteries and has symptoms of a…