Summer ailments: Pain from over exercising

Strains and sprains are some of the most common injuries, especially after physical activity or accidents.

Muscles are attached to bones by tendons; ligaments connect bone to bone. A strain is an overstretched or torn muscle or tendon. A sprain involves damage to a ligament, usually in the ankle, wrist, or knee. Both types of injuries can cause pain, swelling, stiffness, and difficulty moving. While many cases of muscle strain or sprain are minor, knowing when to treat at home and when to seek help is key. Your pharmacist can assess the injury—and in many provinces, can prescribe medication when appropriate.

Something you can try at home for comfort is either ice or heat. Knowing when to use each is important to your recovery.

A common approach for treating strains and sprains is RICE therapy: rest, ice, compression, and elevation. This is most useful for the first 72 hours (3 days) after injury.

  • R – Rest the injured area for the first 24 hours then gradually increase movement.
  • I – Ice for up to 30 minutes, 3 to 4 times per day for the first 48 to 72 hours (2-3 days). Do not apply ice directly to the skin, wrap ice in a thin towel to prevent frostbite.
  • C – Compression with an elastic bandage for the first 24 hours minimizes swelling. Make sure the bandage is not too tight and does not cut off circulation.
  • E – Elevation above heart level to reduce fluid build up and swelling at the site.

Heat therapy can be useful after 48 hours (2 days). Apply a heating pad, or heat pack wrapped in a thin towel, to the area for 20 to 30  minutes every 2 to 4 hours, as needed. Do not combine with pain relieving gels or creams as it can injure the skin.

Q: I went kayaking all weekend and now I have sharp pain in my shoulder and lower back. I think I pulled a muscle. Can a pharmacist help?
A: Yes. This sounds like a common muscle strain, or pulled muscle, from overuse. Your pharmacist can assess the injury and, if appropriate, prescribe anti-inflammatory medications or recommend non-prescription medications. They may also recommend a topical pain relief gel, light movement exercises, and advice on when to switch from ice to heat.

Q: I twisted my ankle hiking yesterday—it’s swollen but I can still walk. Should I go to the walk-in clinic or start with my pharmacist?
A: Start with your pharmacist. It might save you a trip to the doctor or long waits at an urgent care center or emergency room. Your pharmacist can assess the severity of the sprain, recommend compression wraps, reusable ice packs, oral or topical treatments, and monitor your recovery. If needed, they may also prescribe anti-inflammatory medications.  They may refer you to a doctor if needed for further assessment.

Q: I fell off my bike today and my wrist really hurts. It’s swollen and painful. Do I have to go sit in the emergency department at the hospital all day?
A: Maybe not. If you suspect it is broken, then yes, go to the hospital. However, if you are not sure stop at the pharmacy first. Your pharmacist can evaluate your injury for signs of a fracture, such as swelling, deformity, or difficulty moving the wrist. They’ll provide pain relief suggestions like ice packs, recommend supportive braces or wraps, and may prescribe medications or suggest non-prescription treatments for pain relief and swelling. If a break is suspected, they’ll recommend urgent medical care for further assessment and a possible x-ray.

Your pharmacist can provide:

  • Assessment of your injury
  • Pain relief: prescription or non-prescription treatments
  • Compression wraps, braces, ice/heat packs
  • Expert advice on recovery and when to seek further care

Injured? Start with your London Drugs pharmacist! Call ahead or drop-in to your local London Drugs for convenient, effective care and treatment.

How to Set Smart Health and Wellness Goals for an Awesome 2018

smart health and wellness for 2018

It’s that time again – New Year’s Resolution season. Let’s admit it: we always start off strong with motivation and enthusiasm to eat healthier, exercise more, get more sleep and take better care of ourselves, but come mid-January, that enthusiasm starts to wain. Sometimes we just need that little extra spark to keep the fires of motivation burning, and we’ve got some super-handy tech gadgets to add some fuel to your smart health and wellness fire.

Eat Bettersmart health and wellness for 2018

Prep It: Of course preparing your own meals is far healthier than take-out or pre-packaged food, but cooking at home takes extra time and creativity that we don’t always have. Luckily,  The Panasonic Steam Microwave will make your meal prep even easier with easy, oil-free dishes that taste great. The steam function can also be combined with microwave, grill, and convection cooking to give you limitless options for making “healthy” synonymous with “delicious.”

Kick Sugar: Everyone snacks. It’s inevitable—that yawning chasm of time between lunch and dinner will find you eventually. In fact, healthy snacking can actually be good for you, as it fends off swings in blood sugar and prevents binge eating when you’re reaaally hungry. Unfortunately, most store-bought snack foods have a shocking amount of sugar in them, so we’ve got some easy tips for cutting down on sugary snacks here.

Move More

smart health and wellness for 2018

Pump It: The perfect playlist can make or break an intense workout. If you’re addicted to the energy that music gives you, make sure you’re taking full advantage of your tunes with a great set of headphones. Skullcandy’s XTFree Wireless Sport Headphones eliminates the hassle of cords and and keeps you free to pump it up. The lightweight buds have a tight comfortable fit, and you’ll get up to six hours of battery life on a charge to keep you going longer.

Get Up: New studies have shown that there’s a direct relationship between time spent sitting and your risk of early mortality. Doctors suggest that for every 30 consecutive minutes of sitting, standing up and moving or walking for five minutes at brisk pace will reduce the health risks from sitting. If you work at a sedentary job, a standing desk is a great way to avoid sitting for long periods of time. Our Certified Data Standing Desk easily changes from sitting to standing position and has a large surface area to accommodate all of your work activities.

Get Down: Fitness is more fun when it’s a family affair! Get the whole gang grooving with Just Dance, available for Nintendo Switch, PS3 & PS4, Wii & Wii U, and Xbox One and 360.  

Track It: Some people need a little bossing around to stay on track with their fitness. If you don’t want to hire an expensive personal trainer, go for some wearable tech to keep you accountable. London Drugs has a wide range of Fitbit fitness trackers in lots of different styles and price ranges that can help you reach your goals. With the Fitbit app, you can track your daily steps, caloric intake and output, heart rate, sleep habits–all while looking sleek and stylish.

Get more sleep

smart health and wellness for 2018

Light It: Everyone knows that getting enough sleep is essential support for good health: it helps our bodies repair damage, clean out waste products, balance hormones, renew cells, and so much more. New studies have even shown that a good amount of sleep helps you form memories, solidify learning, reduces your risk of depression, increases fitness levels, and helps to avoid weight gain. If the thought of trying to get more sleep seems intimidating, there is some great technology available to help create optimal conditions for a good night’s rest, like the Sleepace Nox Music Smart Sleep Light. It can help you fall asleep easily with soothing light and sound and wakes you up naturally with a smart light alarm. It also collects data from your bedroom environment that impacts your sleep quality and makes smart suggestions on how to improve your sleeping experience.

Hear It: If you like to listen to music or podcasts as you fall asleep but wake up in a tangled mess of headphone wires, the Furo Bluetooth Sleeping Mask helps you rest in comfort while listening to whatever sounds are needed to take you to dreamland. A soft micro-fibre sleeping mask with built-in Bluetooth speakers and a 6-hour battery life will give you a comfortable, tangle-free sleeping experience.

More self-care

smart health and wellness for 2018De-Stress: Ideally, we’d all have a live-in massage therapist to help us work out the knots after a stressful day or a hard workout, but alas, most of us aren’t so lucky. The next best thing could be the Homedics Neck & Shoulder Massager with Heat. This invigorating vibration massager adds heat to soothe tense muscles, and the portable design flexes and shapes to your body, providing the perfect fit for the perfect massage. Makes you want to let out a big “ahhhhhhh” just reading that, doesn’t it?

Breathe In: It’s amazing how scent can affect your mood and well-being. Just ask any of your friends who have jumped on the therapeutic essential oils bandwagon recently: lavender can help you sleep, pine can alleviate stress, citrus can help you feel more energized, and peppermint may boost concentration, just to name a few. An aromatherapy diffuser will help fill your home with whatever scent and mood you crave.

Hopefully, with a little help, we can all stick to our goals for the year (and stay off the road that they say is paved with good intentions), and make 2018 into twenty-GREAT-teen!

Meet Georges St-Pierre in Vancouver on July 10, 2016

GSP London Drugs Event

Attention British Columbia MMA Fans

You can meet twelve-time UFC welterweight champion and three-time Sportsnet Canadian Athlete of the Year Georges St-Pierre (25-2 MMA) in person Sunday, July 10 2016. The event takes place inside London Drugs at 710 Granville Street in Vancouver from 3:00pm to 5:00pm. But it will be best to line up early.

Protein Rush“Rush” will be there to promote his GSP Series supplement line, which will soon be available at London Drugs stores. Because it’s from GSP, a longtime proponent of clean athletic performance, you know it will be good.

Event Details

  • Georges St-Pierre will sign one item per fan.
  • Free printed photos of the champ will be available for signing, if you choose*.
  • Sorry, there will be no time to pose for personal pictures with GSP.
  • Please follow the directions of crowd-control personnel when lining up.

*Limited quantities.

 

Dr Art Hister – Yet Another Reason to Exercise

A terrific talk on aging I heard a while ago pointed out something that I had never considered but which seems to be quite true, and it’s a very depressing thought.

This aging expert pointed out that although you often see pictures of a 70-year-old doing something quite amazing like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, for example, but you never see an 85-year-old doing something similar.

That’s because, he said, of age-related frailty, meaning that we lose our muscle strength as we grow older.
Thus, it’s commonly said that we lose roughly 1 % of our muscle mass every year beyond the age of 40, and eventually – sometime between 75 and 85 for nearly all of us – we reach a tipping point of lost muscle mass when we can’t do so many – or even any – of the things we used to do so easily years before.

So the great news is that maybe that doesn’t have to happen.

In a study with terrifically hopeful possibilities, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh examined 40 competitive athletes – runners, cyclists, swimmers – between the ages of 40 and 81, and the researchers found that – quite to their surprise – that not only did those athletes have as much muscle tissue as people decades younger than them, they also remained nearly as strong as many people a couple of decades younger than them.

Now, clearly these were elite athletes and very few of us are able to train as much as these people do.

But this isn’t an all-or-none situation so seems to me that even some regular exercise can delay or postpone that heretofore seemingly inevitable frailty that the elderly suffer and which condemns so many seniors to having to give up their independence.

And honestly, doesn’t some exercise done a few times a week seem like a small price to pay for raising your chances to live a longer independent life down the line?

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

If you want to run a marathon, get tested first.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, so many baby boomers have set themselves a goal of running a marathon (or several) before they pass into older age. Unfortunately, many have set out to do this without first determining if they are fit enough to undergo the load that marathon-running puts on their no-longer-that-young hearts.

So a recent study presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2010 should get at least a few marathon-hoping individuals to sit up and take note.

In this study that used MRIs and a sophisticated battery of tests on a group of amateur marathon runners both before and up to 8 weeks after the race, the researchers found that “abnormal heart segments (are) more widespread and significant” in non-fit runners (presumably, more widespread than most people or doctors think).
And the lead researcher concludes that “marathon runners can be a lot less fit than they think” (which if you’ve ever been to a marathon and watched the parade of runners that come by is absolutely no surprise). He goes on to advise that everyone who is thinking of running a marathon should seriously consider getting a test known as Vo2 max, which measures oxygen consumption by the heart while the person is working out.

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Bad news for those of you who swear you can’t lose weight because of your genes: you’re probably wrong.

Lots of people swear that no matter what they do, they can’t lose weight, even if they “don’t eat more than a mouse eats, honest”, even if they “exercise till I can’t stand it any longer”.

But the brutal truth is that even though there are a few people out there who indeed cannot lose weight easily, most of us can, and when we don’t lose weight on a diet or from exercise, it’s very likely because we are eating too much or not working out enough, or more often than not, both of those combined.

And if you believe the data from a study published in PLoS Medicine, even most obese people who are genetically prone to becoming massively overweight can nonetheless overcome their genetic predisposition and still lose a significant amount of weight.

In this study, even in obese people who had inherited “17 variants” of genes leading to obesity (in other words, the dice were really loaded against these folks staying slim), those who did the most exercise tended to weigh much less than those who were sedentary, and some were even able to maintain normal weights by doing enough exercise.

Bottom line: if you want your bottom not to grow too large, do more, eat less.

Sorry, but I just report em as I see em.

Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

One of the most important lessons I try to leave with my audiences, especially when I’m addressing a group of seniors, is this: it’s never too late to change and to start doing healthy lifestyle things you’ve long neglected or even never done.

So even when you get into your nineties – and the great thing is that the over-80 demographic is probably the quickest-growing demographic in Canada – there is always something more you can do to make your life more pleasant, to give you more energy, to help you cope with the inevitable conditions that accompany aging, to reduce your risk of illness, to keep your brain sharper, and even perhaps to prolong your life. Although, if you are going to make a change, one other bit of advice: go about it slowly because there’s really no rush.

And to illustrate the truth of that advice, that is, that it really is never too late to make healthy lifestyle changes, a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston followed 2231 patients who had what is called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction, that is, in these people, the left ventricle of the heart (the bearing chamber that sends blood into the rest of the body) wasn’t working properly any more as a result of a heart attack.

Of these people, 463 had been smokers at the time of their heart attack, and although most of us would think that none of them would continue to smoke after suffering a heart attack, we know from many studies that a majority of smokers continue to smoke after a heart attack, which was the case in this study, too: 268 of these people continued to smoke.

At the end of 5 years, comparing the smokers with the ones who’d quit, 15 % of the non-smokers had had a 2nd heart attack compared to 23 % of the smokers.

So repeat after me: it’s never too late to quit, to start doing more exercise, to eat better, etc. It just takes will.

Next Page »