Kids and Smoking

The health risks of tobacco are well known, but kids and teens continue to smoke and use chewing tobacco. Many young people pick up these habits every year — in fact, 90% of all adult smokers started when they were kids. Each day, more than 3,900 kids become regular smokers.

So it's important to make sure kids understand the dangers of tobacco use. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States, and can cause cancer, heart disease, and lung disease. Chewing tobacco (smokeless or spit tobacco) can lead to nicotine addiction, oral cancer, gum disease, and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks.

Giving kids information about the risks of smoking and chewing tobacco, and establishing clear rules and your reasons for them, can help protect them from these unhealthy habits.

You also should know the warning signs of tobacco use and constructive ways to help someone kick the habit.
The Facts About Tobacco

One of the major problems with smoking and chewing tobacco has to do with the chemical nicotine. Someone can get addicted to nicotine within days of first using it. In fact, the nicotine in tobacco can be as addictive as cocaine or heroine. Nicotine affects mood as well as the heart, lungs, stomach, and nervous system.

Other health risks include short-term effects of smoking such as coughing and throat irritation. Over time, more serious conditions may develop, including increases in heart rate and blood pressure, bronchitis, and emphysema.

Finally, numerous studies indicate that young smokers are more likely to experiment with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or other illicit drugs.
The Attraction for Kids

Kids might be drawn to smoking and chewing tobacco for any number of reasons — to look cool, act older, lose weight, win cool merchandise, seem tough, or feel independent.

But parents can combat those draws and keep kids from trying — and getting addicted to — tobacco. Establish a good foundation of communication with your kids early on to make it easier to work through tricky issues like tobacco use.
Prevention Tips

To help prevent your kids from using tobacco, keep these guidelines in mind:
Discuss it in a way that doesn't make kids fear punishment or judgment.
It's important to keep talking to kids about the dangers of tobacco use over the years. Even the youngest child can understand that smoking is bad for the body.
Ask what kids find appealing — or unappealing — about smoking. Be a patient listener.
Read, watch TV, and go to the movies with your kids. Compare media images with what happens in reality.
Encourage kids to get involved in activities that prohibit smoking, such as sports.
Show that you value your kids' opinions and ideas.
Discuss ways to respond to peer pressure to smoke. Your child may feel confident simply saying "no." But also offer alternative responses such as "It will make my clothes and breath smell bad" or "I hate the way it makes me look."
Emphasize what kids do right rather than wrong. Self-confidence is a child's best protection against peer pressure.
Encourage kids to walk away from friends who don't respect their reasons for not smoking.
Explain how much smoking governs the daily life of kids who start doing it. How do they afford the cigarettes? How do they have money to pay for other things they want? How does it affect their friendships?
Establish firm rules that exclude smoking and chewing tobacco from your house and explain why: Smokers smell bad, look bad, and feel bad, and it's bad for everyone's health.
What to Watch For

If you smell smoke on your child's clothing, try not to overreact. Ask about it first — maybe he or she has been hanging around with friends who smoke or just tried one cigarette. Many kids do try a cigarette at one time or another but don't go on to become regular smokers.

Additional signs of tobacco use include:
coughing
throat irritation
hoarseness
bad breath
decreased athletic performance
greater susceptibility to colds
stained teeth and clothing (also signs of chewing tobacco use)
shortness of breath

Getting Through to Kids

Sometimes even the best foundation isn't enough to stop kids from experimenting with tobacco. It may be tempting to get angry, but it's more productive to focus on communicating with your child.

Here are some tips that may help:
Resist lecturing or turning your advice into a sermon.
Uncover what appeals to your child about smoking and talk about it honestly.
Many times, kids aren't able to appreciate how their current behaviors can affect their future health. So talk about the immediate downsides to smoking: less money to spend on other pursuits, shortness of breath, bad breath, yellow teeth, and smelly clothes.
Stick to the smoking rules you've set up. And don't let a child smoke at home to keep the peace.
If you hear, "I can quit any time I want," ask your child to show you by quitting cold turkey for a week.
Try not to nag. Ultimately, quitting is the smoker's decision.
Help your child develop a quitting plan and offer information and resources, and reinforce the decision to quit with praise.
Stress the natural rewards that come with quitting: freedom from addiction, improved fitness, better athletic performance, and improved appearance.
Encourage a meeting with your doctor, who can be supportive and may have treatment plans.
If You Smoke

Kids are quick to observe any contradiction between what their parents say and what they do. Despite what you might think, most kids say that the adult whom they most want to be like when they grow up is a parent.

If you're a smoker:
First, admit to that you made a mistake by starting to smoke and that if you had it to do over again, you'd never start.
Second, quit. It's not simple and it may take a few attempts and the extra help of a program or support group. But your kids will be encouraged as they see you overcome your addiction to tobacco.

Reviewed by: Steven Dowshen, MD
Date reviewed: November 2010

NIKE Shoes Allah

Boycott Puma & Nike Becasue they have written Allah(swt) on their shoes!

These people always try to embarrass Islam on each and every way they can.
Let`s stop purchasing and using these products and make these companies suffer.

FOR PROOF:

"AIR" was written in such a way on the backside of the shoe, if observed closely looks as "Allah" written in Arabic.

  

This PUMA Shoes is Still on Sale write 345404 03 in Google search and See yourself.

NIKE'S ADVERTISEMENT:  Nike's ad which shows Muslims prostrating to a woman in one of their brand jeans. I will remind you of what the Company Nike did to Muslims when they portray the name of Allah on one of their sports shoes. The result was that Malaysia, Indonesia and the Gulf states including Saudi Arabia stopped importing Nike products. If you look carefully you will find that it was after that incident that Nike began to report earnings less than expected on the wall street which caused their stock price to tumble. The stock price has not recovered yet. Check it for yourselves.

COCA-COLA : This is the most commonly used cold drinks in the world. If you ever see coca-cola written in Mirror Image you just might notice with a thorough observation that it says "LA MAKKAH, LA MUHAMMAD", (meaning no Makkah, no Muhammad) in Arabic, This is another freemasonic work.

Selling Allah, Muhammad Name Shoes:

Health: Egypt Clamps Down on Organ Trafficking

Written by David Rosenberg

A new law that aims to stop Egypt’s poor from selling their kidneys and other organs faces as an uphill battle as the country’s deteriorating economy pushes more and more people into making desperate and dangerous decisions to raise money.

The new law, which went into effect this month after years of debate, bans the practice of paying money for human organs and restricts donations from live donors to family members of the fourth degree. That, in effect, bans foreigners from receiving transplants. Removing organs without government authorization will be treated as first-degree murder. Transplant procedures for the poor will be financed by the State.

Egypt is one of the last countries of the Arab world to implement organ-transplant legislation. As lawmakers dawdled and religious scholars debated the definition of death, the country became a hub for regional trafficking in organs, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).

“After the revolution people are talking much more about human dignity and ending poverty. There is much more awareness that selling an organ isn’t the equivalent of donating blood,” Sherine Hamdy, whose book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt will be published next January, told The Media Line. “On the other hand, the economic situation is pretty severe …That’s a problem to be addressed.”

For many, a couple of thousand dollars for a kidney – even if the amount ultimately paid was typically less than promised – meant debts could be paid off or enough money accumulated to start a business in an economy were unemployment is in the double digits and growing.

A woman identified as Aisha recalls her bitter experience selling her kidney. “My financial circumstances became very difficult and I didn’t know what to do. Some people told me to donate my kidney and get money. I went to a lab and they told me I would get money for donating my kidney and that nothing would happen to me physically,” she recalled in a filmed interview for Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions, an organization combating the trafficking of humans for organs.

But after she completed the operation, her health never quite recovered and she could no longer work. Her husband abandoned the family, taking the proceeds. “I lost my kidney, my money, everything,” she said.

Hamdy, who is an anthropologist at Brown University, said that because transplants have lived in a legal twilight zone, people who were victimized couldn’t turn to the law.

“A lot of times you have people coming to police claiming their organ were stolen,” she said. “Often what happened was that people were promised larger sums of money than they were delivered or that the operation was much less risky than it (ultimately) was. Not wanting to incriminate themselves as having sold their organ, they would claim their organs were stolen. But prosecutors hadn’t yet been able to do anything because of the absence of a law.”

If anything, however, the economic pressures that helped create the problem have been magnified by the collapse of the Egyptian economy by the protests and strikes that brought down President Husni Mubarak last February and continue to this day. The government has promised big increases in subsidiaries and other welfare spending, but it doesn’t have the means to pay for it.

A survey by the U.S.-based International Republic Institute in April found that 41% of those polled said they have trouble covering their basic needs and feeding their families.

Susanne Lundin, a professor of ethnology at Sweden’s Lund University who studies the global organ trade, told The Media Line that the new law is unlikely to deter either demand for or supply of organs, and instead will drive the market underground as has happened in other countries that passed similar legislation.

Egypt is one of a handful countries identified by the World Health Organization as organ-trafficking hot spots. Others like China, Pakistan and the Philippines have outlawed organ sales and barred foreigners from undergoing transplants to stop transplant tourism. Even before the law went into effect, Cairo was cracking down on the phenomenon, but even that effort stalled amid the chaos surrounding Mubarak’s fall from power.

The Philippines passed its law in 2007 but just four years later finds itself debating how to revise it.

“It didn’t work at all. The illegal trade grew much more after that. So now the Philippines are trying to revaluate it and legalize people coming to buy organs. There is a big fight underway,” Lundin said. “When it was legal or half legal for foreigners to come, they could do it openly. When they were excluded they had no choice but to do it on the black market.”

For legislation to work, the government has to undertake an extensive information campaign aimed at both donors and recipients, Lundin said. Donors are usually poor and often so uneducated they don’t understand the risk they take, she said, recalling an interview with a man who, when asked he if would be prepared to donate his liver, responded he didn’t know what a liver was. Recipients risk getting a diseased organ and often get improper follow-up care.

Legislation governing organ transplants was first broached by Egypt’s Doctors Syndicate eight years ago, but the effort got ensnared in a controversy over the Islamic definition of death. Iran and Saudi Arabia both accept brain death as enough to allow organs to be removed for transplant and Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's pre-eminent institution, endorsed a brain-death standard.

But many lawmakers opposed it, saying it would open the door to abuses by doctors. The popular television preacher, Muhammad Mutwali ash-Sharawi, who died in 1998, opposed organ transplantation in any forms, arguing that the body belongs to God, a view shared by many ordinary Egyptians, according to experts.

As a result, Egypt may find it hard to convince people or their families to donate organs even though the law establishes a fund to help pay transplants. Samia Sabri, a cornea specialist at Cairo University, told the IRIN news service, a unit of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, that it hasn’t been easy to find donors even though a law regulating cornea transplants has been in effect since 1963.

Health: Why You Should Quit Smoking TODAY

Friday June 24, 2011

Everyone knows that smoking accelerates atherosclerosis, and makes heart attacks more likely over time.
But did you know that the cigarette you smoke today could cause a heart attack TODAY?  Or that if you quit smoking today, your risk of a heart attack is substantially reduced by tomorrow?
That very next stick you light up could do you in. 

Health: Heart Failure - What You Need To Know

Monday June 27, 2011

In heart failure, the heart is no longer capable of meeting all the body's needs.
The good news is that medical science has made amazing progress over the past several years in treating heart failure - in reducing symptoms, and in reducing the risk of death.
The bad news is that a majority of patients with heart failure are not receiving the therapy they need. So if you have heart failure, you need to learn everything you can about this condition, to help your doctor make sure you are getting the treatment you need.

Health: How To Assess Your Own Cardiac Risk

Friday July 1, 2011

Your doctor is supposed to assess your cardiac risk for you, and coach you on what you should be doing to reduce that risk. But, despite pleas from medical experts and professional societies to do so, many doctors are still bad at performing accurate risk assessments, and are particularly terrible about spending the necessary time to instruct their patients on appropriate steps to reduce that risk.
This, one supposes, is to be expected when efficiency experts (those employed by insurance companies and the government, the parties whose money is at risk whenever patients see doctors)  have determined that 7.5 minutes is the appropriate average time for a "patient encounter." Doctors who do not want to be officially designated "low quality" need to pay attention to these and other expert-generated guidelines.
It is thus fortunate that, to a large extent, cardiac risk assessment is something you can do yourself.

Health: Deciding On The Best Treatment For Cholesterol

Monday July 4, 2011

So many options are available for treating cholesterol levels - how should you and your doctor decide on which is best for you?
The first step is to determine whether your cholesterol levels need to be treated at all. This decision is most often based on an estimate of your 10-year risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Read here about estimating your risk, and determining whether you need treatment for cholesterol.
If your cholesterol levels are higher than they ought to be - given the level of your cardiovascular risk - then your doctor will likely recommend treatment.  Read here about how to decide which kind of cholesterol treatment is right for you.