Tuesday, December 22, 2015
STUDENT LIFE
healthy holidays Story and cartoons by Staff Reporter Allison Reagan Winter is right around the corner, and with it come colds, cracked lips, dry skin and sniffling noses. To help make your winter a little more bearable this year, here are some tips to keep you healthy until the flowers bloom again.
Lips One of the worst ways to start the day is with a dry mouth and painfully chapped lips. Most people only have to suffer through dryness and flaking, but for some, winter can turn lips into a bleeding and cracking mess. As dermatologist Douglas Kligman explains, the low humidity and lack of moisture in the air during the winter make our lips and hands extremely dry. An easy way to avoid dry lips during the cold is to apply lip balm regularly. Dr. Kligman recommends products containing petrolatum or beeswax, as they are thick and moisturizing. Taking care to smear it on before school, during the day and especially before bed will help ensure your lips stay healthy and crack-free all winter. Recommended lip balm: Burt’s Bees Beeswax Lip Balm
Skin If people have ever recoiled in horror at the scales on your hands, you are probably all too familiar with winter’s worst effect: red, raw, cracked hands. They itch, they burn and they are painful to look at. But they are completely preventable. According to Dr. Kligman, hands should be moisturized every
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night with a thick moisturizer. For extremely dry hands, Dr. Kligman also recommends wearing gloves at night over a healthy amount of petroleum jelly. The gloves help to prevent evaporation and leave your hands soft and smooth the next morning. Once you get your skin back to normal, be sure to take precautionary measures to prevent them from becoming damaged again. According to Dr. Kligman, irritants like water, gasoline and turpentine should be avoided during the water. Wear gloves when outside or exposed to heavy winds and rubber gloves when doing chores like washing the dishes. Washing hands is important during the winter months, but be sure to dry them thoroughly and reapply lotion as soon as possible after you are done. Recommended hand cream: Vaseline
Cold Season You can hear it a mile away. The inevitable sneezing, coughing, hacking, wheezing and honking that accompanies every winter season. It may seem like you are doomed to the same miserable fate, but there are a few ways to avoid sickness this year. Most importantly, remember to wash your hands.
“My best advice is to wash your hands and try to avoid other people that are sick or coughing, especially in a department store or somewhere where you’re out shopping,” Conestoga school nurse Jill Yeager said. “Try to stay out of the way of people that are spreading their germs.”
“According to Dr. Kligman, hands should be moisturized every night with a thick moisturizer. For extremely dry hands, Dr. Kligman also recommends wearing gloves at night over a healthy amount of petroleum jelly.” As always, washing your hands often and thoroughly is one of the easiest ways to avoid getting sick. “If you don’t use a lot of fric-
tion, you may not be cleaning your hands properly,” registered nurse Suzie Brook said. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), handwashing education can reduce respiratory illnesses, like colds, in the general population by 16 to 21 percent. Also, (and I think you might like this one) it is important to stay home when you are sick. Yes, we are actually telling you to stay home from school, but only to prevent the spread of germs to healthy students. Reducing the amount of time spent around other people while you are sick lessens the chance of your cold sticking around any longer than it should. A little rest at home won’t hurt either. But “as long as you are fever-free and are well enough to be able to concentrate,” you shouldn’t need to stay home for more than a day or two, according to Brook. However, the single best way to prevent the nastiest of all winter sicknesses, the flu, is to get vaccinated each year. According to the CDC, over 200,000 people are hospitalized for flu-related complications, and as many as 49,000 people die each year. “It’s important to get the flu shot to protect yourself. Obviously, it’s going to protect you more than if you don’t have one and also it’s
important for the people you come in contact with that you’re protected,” Brook said. Recommended places to get a flu shot: Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid
Winter Blues Almost everyone gets a case of the “winter blues” every now and again, but for some, seasonal sadness is a much more serious issue. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a U.S. government-funded national resource for molecular biology information, between four and six percent of people in the United States suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) during the winter. SAD is a seasonal depression that usually begins with the start of winter and ends with the arrival of spring. Symptoms of SAD include low energy, trouble sleeping, loss of interest in hobbies, difficulty concentrating or general feelings of sluggishness or agitation that appear during the late fall or early winter. Like any other depression, SAD is treatable and manageable with different medications, increased exposure to light and therapies, but only once it has been detected. If you believe your chilly melancholy is more than just a winter funk, SAD may be why.
Allison Reagan/The SPOKE