|
|
|
Concerned about Rheumatoid Arthritis?
Arthritis is the term used for over 100 rheumatoid and joint related diseases, with the most common being Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis.
The word arthritis refers to "joint inflammation" and rheumatoid arthritis is actually an attack on...
Depression: Nothing to Sneeze At
How common is depression? So common that it is thought of as the common cold of mental illnesses. However, this is not to understate the severity of depression which is one of the leading indicators of suicide. By some estimates depression costs the...
Medicines in Mental Health
You walk into a moderately business office sit down a chair in a
well-dressed lobby and wait for your name to be announced.
Finally, it comes and you are assessed by an intake worker,
finally sent to a therapist a week later, and then...
The First Harvest
First responders arrived at the home initially, followed
soon thereafter by paramedics. We picked up the dispatch over the radio scanner and prepared our minds and equipment in trauma room one. This one was a long time coming which surprised us...
Using Probability in Medical Diagnosis: A Headache Example
Experienced clinicians begin the process of making a diagnosis
upon first laying eyes on a patient, and probability is one of
the main tools they use in this process. A glimpse "behind the
scenes" from the point of view of a diagnosing physician...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Alpha Hydroxy Acids (AHA's)
Alpha hydroxy acids (AHA's) are widely promoted in Women's and beauty magazines. Much is written about their effectiveness of preventing wrinkles and slowing down the aging processes in your skin... but do you know what they are? Should you use them on your skin? Are they natural? Should they be in your natural skin care products?
In the following article we will attempt to shed some light into these questions and give you all the information you need to make an informed choice.
Alpha Hydroxy Acids: Do they belong in natural skin care products?
•What are they?
•How are they useful to our skin?
•Are they a natural ingredient in skin care?
Alpha hydroxy acids (AHA’s) are Fruit acids, which are weak organic acids derived from various sources such as, grapes, apples, sugar cane, maple, pineapple, papaya, willow bark, lemon, lime, sour milk, blackberries, yoghurt and cider, and play an important role in skin care.
Fruit acids are natural exfoliants that perform a number of functions at the level of the stratum corneum on the skin's surface:
•Loosen and dissolve dead cells from the skin’s surface
•Help to regenerate new skin cells,
•Aid in the control of acne, smooth rough dry skin, improve the texture of sun-damaged and aging skin and
•Retain moisture, which leaves your skin healthy and vibrant.
Naturally contained AHA’s are basically a good thing, unfortunately, many companies are using concentrated extracts, or worse still, synthetically manufactured AHA’s or BHA’s (beta hydroxy acids), and that is not a good thing.
When scientists comes across a ‘new substance’, so to speak, they have a tendency to want to make it better than nature’s version… more concentrated for quicker results… and so on. Unfortunately, this usually brings with it side effects and sometimes actual physical damage.
A natural ingredient – just what exactly does that mean?
Does it mean it is a substance that nature created and it has been added to a product in order to make that product natural? No, a natural ingredient is an ingredient that is, where ever possible, present in it’s natural form, for example AHA’s can be extracted and then added to a product, thereby the maker of that product can claim it contains ‘Natural ingredients’. Or the AHA’s can be use in a product in the form of an extract of Papaya with all the other ingredients present in Papaya fruit. This is a more balanced set of ingredients that work together (synergistically) to achieve a desired effect, thus it is a truly natural ingredient.
Let me give you an
example: Aspirin (a very commonly used pain killer) is derived from the bark of the white Willow tree. The substance or the active ingredient is called Salicylic acid, a BHA. This is the stuff that reduces pain. It is also the stuff that can cause Stomach ulcers….
Now, the herbal extract of the white Willow bark does not (or is much less likely to) cause Stomach ulcers. Why? Because the herbal extract contains many other ingredients that are contained in the bark, which the extraction process brings out. Some of these substances are mucilaginous (Porridge is mucilaginous) which means they are slippery and when taken internally, they cover the membrane of the Stomach (the lining) and prevent the salicylic acid from causing irritation or ulceration – clever, isn’t she, that Mother Nature woman?
Sometimes you will hear these additional ingredients referred to as “phyto-chemicals”. This is very current topic today with respect to Vitamins and other ‘natural’ supplements.
What does all this have to do with natural skin care? Well, as I have written before. Natural skin care is not necessarily natural and one could debate back and forth what ‘natural’ is, or what it should be. One thing is certain, natural skin care products should not contain any ‘un-natural’ ingredients, be they synthetically produced or in ‘purified / isolated form’. Natural should be as close as possible to the way it is found in nature.
That is not to say one should not use Vitamin E as a principal ingredient in a cream, but it should not be of a synthetically derived form. Wheat germ oil, for example, is very high in Vitamin E and contains many other phyto-chemicals, which are nourishing to the skin.
At Wildcrafted Herbal Products we choose to define natural as ‘the way nature created it’, so we prefer not to use isolated natural ingredients. Instead, we choose to use ingredients from plant extracts, essential oils, carrier oils and other extraction processes according to Naturopathic principles, which preserve the integrity of the plant or relevant plant parts.
I hope this clarifies some of the confusion that is propagated in the media about AHA’s and provides you with information you can use when next looking at ingredients on natural skin care products.
About the Author
Danny Siegenthaler is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and together with his wife Susan, a medical herbalist and aromatherapist, they have created Natural Skin Care Products by Wildcrafted Herbal Products to share their 40 years of combined expertise with you.
|
|
|
|
|
| National Library of Medicine - National Institutes of Health |
| Part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine offers access to health information for consumer, patient, and physicians ... |
| www.nlm.nih.gov |
|
| Health and Medical Information produced by doctors - MedicineNet.com |
| Doctor-produced health and medical information written for you to make informed decisions about your health concerns. |
| www.medicinenet.com |
|
| Medicine in the Yahoo! Directory |
| Collection of sites for health professionals, with sections on specific disciplines, organizations, continuing education, conferences, publications, ... |
| dir.yahoo.com |
|
| MedlinePlus Health Information from the National Library of Medicine |
| Health information from the National Library of Medicine. Easy access to Medline and Health topics, medical dictionaries, directories and publications. |
| medlineplus.gov |
|
| Medicine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Medicine is a branch of health science and the sector of public life ... The practice of medicine combines both science as the evidence base and art in the ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
|
| Journal Home - Nature Medicine |
| Nature Medicine has a vacancy for a Locum Assistant Editor for six months. The position involves working in all aspects of the editorial process, ... |
| www.nature.com |
|
| The New England Journal of Medicine: Research & Review Articles on ... |
| The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is a weekly general medical journal that publishes new medical research findings, review articles, and editorial ... |
| content.nejm.org |
|
| eMedicine Clinical Knowledge Base |
| eMedicine features up-to-date, searchable, peer-reviewed medical journals, online physician reference textbooks, and a full-text article database in 62 ... |
| www.emedicine.com |
|
| Open Directory - Health: Medicine |
| the entire directory, only in Health/Medicine. Top: Health: Medicine (11429). Description · Medical Specialties (4888); Surgery (2265) ... |
| dmoz.org |
|
| the www virtual library biosciences medicine |
| www.ohsu.edu/cliniweb/wwwvl/ - Similar pages |
|
|
| Medicine - home |
| Bimonthly journal covering the latest results in clinical investigation relevant to hospital and office practice. |
| www.md-journal.com |
|
| Institute of Medicine |
| The Institute of Medicine serves as adviser to the nation to improve health. |
| www.iom.edu |
|
| ScienceDaily: Health & Medicine News |
| Medical Research News. Health news on everything from cancer to nutrition. Full-text, images, updated daily. |
| www.sciencedaily.com |
|
| Google Directory - Health > Medicine |
| Search only in Medicine Search the Web. Medicine. Health > Medicine, Go to Directory Home. Categories. Alternative Medicine (6308) Basic Sciences (66) ... |
| www.google.com |
|
| the world wide web virtual library biosciences medicine |
| www.mcb.harvard.edu/biopages/medicine.html - Similar pages |
|
|
| PLoS Medicine - A Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Journal |
| PLoS Medicine is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal published ... Every issue of PLoS Medicine contains a selection of readers' responses. ... |
| medicine.plosjournals.org |
|
| Medicine On-Line - Medicine Online -The International Medical Journal |
| Medicine Online - independent and peer reviewed journal published by Priory Medical Journals - priory.com. |
| www.priory.com |
|
| Entrez PubMed |
| PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for ... |
| www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov |
|
| Stanford University School of Medicine |
| Home Page of the Stanford University School of Medicine. |
| med.stanford.edu |
|
| Medicine OnLine |
| Meds.com offers medical information and education on cancer (lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, leukemia) and HIV / AIDS for patients, ... |
| www.meds.com |
|
|