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10 Things to Know & Do Before and After Heart Surgery

You have just learned that heart surgery is inevitable. Here is a quick checklist to ensure you are ready. This is not to scare you, your spouse, or your loved ones. This is so that as a team you go into this experience completely prepared and ready.

10 Things to Know & Do BEFORE Heart Surgery

1. Say a prayer. Bring the whole family together...

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Proton Pump Inhibitors and Plavix
To prescribe or not to prescribe

In the past few weeks, there has been much concern regarding drugs known collectively as proton pump inhibitors and the increased risk of heart attacks while taking these drugs together. In order to understand this concern, it is important to understand what these drugs do and why physicians prescribe them.

Proton pump inhibitors (also known as PPIs) are drugs prescribed by your doctor to prevent or decrease the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. A cardiac stent is a device implanted in a blood vessel in a procedure known as an angioplasty in order to improve the blood flow in a blood vessel that supplies the heart muscle...

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10 Health Habits That Will Help You Live to 100
YOU DON'T NEED TO EAT YOGURT AND LIVE ON A MOUNTAINTOP, BUT YOU DO NEED TO FLOSS.

By Deborah Kotz
The biggest factor that determines how well you age is not your genes but how well you live. Not convinced? A new study published in the British Medical Journal of 20,000 British folks shows that you can cut your risk of having a stroke in half by doing the following four things: being active for 30 minutes a day, eating five daily servings of fruit and vegetables, and avoiding cigarettes and excess alcohol.

While those are some of the obvious steps you can take to age well, researchers have discovered that centenarians tend to share certain traits in how they eat, move about, and deal with stress—the sorts of things we can emulate to improve our own aging process. Of course, getting to age 100 is enormously more likely if your parents did. Still, Thomas Perls, who studies the century-plus set at Boston University School of Medicine, believes that assuming you've sidestepped genes for truly fatal diseases like Huntington's, "there's nothing stopping you from living independently well into your 90s." Heck, if your parents and grandparents were heavy smokers, they might have died prematurely without ever reaching their true potential lifespan, so go ahead and shoot for those triple digits by following these 10 habits.

1. Don't retire. "Evidence shows that in societies where people...

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Three Killer Diseases of Mankind

Many of us have these three diseases attacking and killing us right now. All of them are innocuous to antibiotics or surgeries. They are the number one killers of mankind. They sadly are contagious and only serve to kill you, kill your spirit for making a difference, and kill your appetite for living. The symptoms are nearly undetectable from the inside out and since so many others are inflicted, the killer trio hides among us. You can live an entire and long life and be struck with their consequences throughout it.

You can ultimately die and never have lived. Your life will not be a full life or a life worthwhile and impactful to the world around you. You can see rare examples of people that have beaten these diseases. Yes, they are beatable, but you must be willing to fight that fight for life. The people who have overcome these three killer diseases accomplish what so many see as impossible and nearly magical. Before a cure can be dispensed, you must first confront the signs of infection.

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