Skip to main content

About the heart

The heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. It pumps blood around your body and beats approximately 70 times a minute. After the blood leaves the right side of the heart, it goes to your lungs where it picks up oxygen. The oxygen-rich blood returns to your heart and is then pumped to the body's organs through a network of arteries. The blood returns to your heart through veins before being pumped back to your lungs again. This process is called circulation. The heart gets its own supply of blood from a network of blood vessels on the heart's surface called coronary arterie

Popular posts from this blog

PF-ROM Exercises

"Pain-free range of motion’ or early mobilization exercises can help you heal" PF-ROM is physical therapy talk for “pain free range of motion.” When a therapist evaluates an injury, he or she will be interested to see how far you can move affected joints without hurting. Sometimes, of course, you can’t move at all without pain. But in most injuries, even many serious ones, you will have at least some painless movement. And whatever you’ve got, you should use. When you are hurt, the pain-free range is your new best friend: that’s the range you’ll be exercising in for a while. Pain free range of motion exercises are also known as “early mobilization.” Use it or lose it “Use it or lose it,” they say. And it’s true. While many seemingly simple medical questions are controversial, this one appears to be straightforward: plenty of recent research demonstrates that early mobilization is A Very Good Thing. A 2006 study of people with surgically repaired achilles tendon ruptures sh...
Read more

What is dementia?

Dementia is a syndrome (a group of related symptoms) associated with an ongoing decline of brain functioning. This may include problems with: memory loss thinking speed mental sharpness and quickness language understanding judgement mood movement difficulties carrying out daily activities There are many different causes of dementia. People often get confused about the difference between Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia and, together with vascular dementia, makes up the vast majority of cases. People with dementia can become apathetic or uninterested in their usual activities, or may have problems controlling their emotions. They may also find social situations challenging and lose interest in socialising. Aspects of their personality may change. A person with dementia may lose empathy (understanding and compassion), they may see or hear things that other people do not (hallucinations). Because people with dementia may lose t...
Read more

Stress at work

People with high-stress jobs have twice the risk of developing serious depression or anxiety compared with others in less stressful occupations, The Independent reported. The link between rising rates of depression and rates of work stress means that “one in 20 cases of depression or anxiety annually is attributable to high stress at work”, it stated on August 2 2007. Highly stressed jobs include head chefs and construction workers, the paper reports, and least stressful jobs include looking after children at home, “where there are no deadlines to meet, greater flexibility and no fear of public failure”. The researchers explain that “time pressure is the single most important cause of stress and of the illness to which it leads,” the newspaper said. The research supports the intuitive link between stress at work and the mental health of young working adults. Where did the story come from? The research was carried out by Maria Melchior and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry, K...
Read more