Alcohol Awareness and Addiction

Alcohol is undoubtedly the most commonly used addictive substance in the United States with approximately 17.6 million people, or one in every 12 adults, suffering from physical symptoms of alcohol abuse or dependence. Along with that shocking statistic, there are several million more people who are taking part in frequent binge drinking that leads to serious health problems down the road.  Without proper assessment or treatment, people fall short not knowing about the true causes of alcoholism and how to control the sweeping symptoms they face in the process.

Yet, not much has changed in the level of awareness on why alcohol is so addicting, damaging, and intoxicating once flowing through the body. Sure, we have a few celebrities or other media stars that have come out about getting over their alcoholism and preach about why it’s so harmful, but most people turn a blind eye. We all know a friend who prefers a tequila sunrise every Saturday over a plain orange juice, but sometimes we don’t speak up to voice our concerns on their dependency because it’s uncomfortable. No matter what your age, sex, or background is, you need to take an alcohol assessment if you feel that it’s taking too much control of your life.

How Does Addiction Even Start?

Alcoholism usually has little to do with what kind of alcohol the person drinks and more to do with combating the person’s uncontrollable need for alcohol to get through the best and worst of life events.  Most alcoholics can’t just “use a little willpower” to cease their drinking. Think about the last time you told yourself you’d just have one more chip before putting away the bag. Most people can’t bear to allow themselves to only consume a tiny amount until they realize they’ve downed more than their stomach can hold. The same goes for drinking, as the sugary taste, blinding drunk spell, and temporary confidence is sometimes a feeling that people want to keep chasing for as long as possible.

Causes of alcoholism varies from person to person, but often when combined with low amounts of sleep, high amounts of stress, sometimes too much free time, the synergistic result can be scary. College students exemplify this effect as we are sometimes held as the classic stereotype for downing keg stands and strong shots to fit in on the regular.  

Over time, what was once a fun night out becomes daily drinks to get through the hardest exam or most stressful conversation of your life. You feel relieved once the taste of alcohol hits your taste buds, as reality’s nagging moments fade away as quick as alcohol is being absorbed in your body. Physical symptoms of alcoholism aren’t too difficult to point out, as  slurred speech, dizziness, feeling queasy, or even passing out are all obvious effects of taking too much in too little time. Repeating this process for several months to several years is even more damaging, as a person will experience increased risks of diseases that we rarely want to think about. Cancer, kidney or liver failure, decreased digestion and skin health, and potential stroke or heart attack are among the risks to name a few. I don’t know about you, but minimizing that from happening to my body is definitely on the top of my list so I can see better days. The consequences heavily outweigh the short term benefits that alcohol may bring.

Is Treatment Tough?

Treatment is only what you make of it. It can be the most cumbersome experience of your life if you’re not willing to put the time and effort in, or it can be a healing wave of learning about how your body can better function. It makes a lot of sense to feel like getting treated for physical symptoms of alcoholism is a waste of time and just plain tiring when you have other things to take care of. On the other hand, your body at the end of the day is all you have. Having ill health will indefinitely affect every other facet of your life if you don’t put taking care of it as a top priority.

Seeking social support is often what’s recommended to a person who is battling many physical symptoms of alcoholism. Seek what resources are available to an addict who has your background, whether it’s an online forum or even a close friend who knows what emotions and fears are racing through your mind right now. However, trust that the recovery process will work and it’s totally normal to be scared when change comes. We are all a little uncomfortable when we have to change how we go about our lives, but often when it’s a health one we feel on top of the world after growing accustomed to it.

Reaching out to a professional is also a surefire way to gain more information on the physical and mental recovery from addiction. Everyone’s path to sobering up will be different, as our lifestyles, triggers, and preferences to what we’re comfortable with extremely vary. Remember that you’re not alone and you always have room to improve your situation if it feels dark in the present.

As a student who formerly felt pulled to the taste of alcohol, I can say for a fact that turning to more productive and healthy hobbies like fitness changed my life for the better. I’ve made better friends, am getting a lot more done than before, and feel just brighter in general. Not that I don’t enjoy a drink here and there, because truly celebrating and enjoying life isn’t wrong. It’s the emotional cling to alcohol that must be addressed if you start to notice it’s affecting important parts of your life.

Alcohol Assessments

Contrary to what you may think, alcohol assessments are extremely quick and easy to do in your own time when you want to informally diagnose what’s going on in your body and life with alcohol in the mix. While not widely talked about, an addiction-specific professional’s input on why you’re addicted to alcohol can shove you in the healthy direction to improving your lifestyle. Alcohol assessments are completely free to do and can be done from just about anywhere. Next time you’re waiting in line or commuting, don’t be afraid to pull out their browser and spare a few minutes to take one. You might learn a thing or two and get that motivation to set your recovery on fire!

Veterinary compounding pharmacy

Our pets are our best friends, and when it comes to their health any owner wants to provide them the best quality of care and medication possible. These days, many owners are using compounding pharmacies to help administer specific medications to their household pets.

Medication for dogs, in particular, are delivered by this method if they need different medications at one time.

However, to the general public, wrapping one’s mind to this process can be confusing to understand at first. Breaking down the basics of how compounding pharmacies work can help you as a pet owner make the best medical decisions for your furry friend.

The Basics

Animals often have differences in the same diseases humans can have today, including itchy skin rashes, annoying eye and ear infections, stressful heart conditions, cancer, and even diabetes. Medicating your pets present a unique problem that often is best dealt with through the process of compounding. Compounding is the manipulation of any type of drug that’s beyond what is described on the drug bottle.

As any pet owner knows well, treating animals can be extremely difficult with hard to swallow or foul-tasting medications. With the power of compounding, an owner can hire a pharmacy to mix their pet’s drug with another easily digestible substance, dilute it so it’s less strong as a dose, flavor it, or change the form of the dosage itself.

Veterinary drugs should be compounded with the explicit permission of the vet after the appointment, since every patient’s needs and tolerance can be extremely different. Compounding usually is needed when the animal is suffering from a physical condition where no pet medication is available to effectively treat their systems. As a result, each solution is developed on a case by case basis depending on the severity of the problem.

For example, if a cat or dog needs a certain medication that is only being produced as a pill, the owner can seek a veterinary compounding pharmacy to have the drug compounded into a flavored liquid that the pet will gladly take instead. Other popular examples that pet health pharmacies discuss with their clients who are interested in compounding are mixing two injectable drugs and preparing an oral paste that will be absorbed quickly by the pet’s body.

Obtaining Pet Medications

If you discover that your dog or cat needs a compounded medication, it’s important where your resources lie to obtain it. Sometimes your own veterinarian’s office can specifically compound a pet medication for you if the procedure is already deemed legal in the state that you live in. Otherwise, they can write up a prescription and refer you to a veterinary compounding pharmacy for further assistance.

One significant tip is to make sure that pharmacy you’re referred is licensed within the state. You can check their legitimacy by visiting the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy site and check what business are already accredited with great reviews.

If you have more than one pet suffering from the same symptoms, absolutely avoid using prescriptions for compounded medications for the both of them. Prescriptions are specifically written for individual animals, so using one pet’s compounded medication for another pet could seriously harm their health.

Safety First

Checking out the source of your pet medication is as important as the drug itself. If your pet gets sick or needs medication on an ongoing basis, explore the range of options that are available to cut down unneeded costs and hassle.

First, if your veterinarian recommends a certain prescription medication, talk to them about your concerns and if any other alternatives are available from local pharmacies. Additionally, some popular pet medications, including ones required to treat symptoms of flea and tick infections in a variety of mammals, may not immediately call for a written prescription.

However, it’s still a smart idea to talk about all the treatment routes with your vet before confirming your choice on a particular brand.

Lastly, as you weigh the pros and cons between your pet medications, consider other helpful factors like how easy the drug will be to administer, the time you will be spending to wait for its delivery, and the time frame of when your pet needs to start the medication.

The Bottom Line

Today, accessing the right pet medications for our cats, dogs, ferrets, and other pets are easier with the help of more digital pharmaceutical services. Before jumping into any types of conclusions on what will suit your pet’s needs best, be sure to listen closely to what your vet has to say for their health in the long term.

Sometimes pet owners like to believe that they know their pet better than anyone else alive, but at the end of the day, a pet pharmacy will be more efficiently equipped to get them on the road to better days.

Remember to weigh the costs of your options and the side effects that certain drugs will cause to your pet. The best way to help them feel better is to minimize the discomfort that taking medications usually leads to. With the power of compounding and a written prescription, you will be saving time and effort to build up their health!

Tips on effective website design for your business

Whether you  work in the business to customer (B2C) or the business to business (B2B) industry, there’s no reason to not pursue minor and major improvements for your brand’s website. It may seem like a huge task to revamp your online storefront, but keeping your website design relevant and frequently updated goes a long way towards attracting new business.

Before throwing out your old structure and content, there are some important pieces of advice to keep in mind to ensure you can portray your brand in the best method possible. Creating effective website design can be hard to accomplish for both small and large businesses in our technology-focused culture. Organizing a website’s structure, content, and aesthetic is overwhelming at first. since it takes time and effort.

However, any person who is running a business and wants to improve their brand awareness will understand that establishing an amazing web page will build a strong foundation for successful marketing campaigns to their customers within the long-term future.  

Value Your Customer

Everyone has a different style and set of opinions to what a great business website looks like. However, most of us put our own beliefs on a pedestal since we want to think we know our brand best and how to sell it. Business owners who are stubborn to steer away from their preferred designs will be in for a rude awakening, because at the end of the day the customer and visitors to your website will always come first.

Your potential visitors can easily decide how appealing your website content is in a matter of just five seconds after they arrive on it. If it’s chaotic, too vague, or simply too much of information overload, you already know that they will be exiting your site right away.

Since losing out on a potential customer to a competitor is any business owner’s greatest fear, you have to let go your stubborn mindset before it influences the rest of your website text, images, and design as a whole.

People report that the most successful business websites contain strong consistency in regards to its content when they visit. This includes having similar fonts, image styles, videos, and a single and focused “message” permeating throughout. Making this type of change will seal in the mission statement of what your business is about and who your target customer base is. Your customer will also feel much more excited to read into what services or products you have to show off to the rest of the world!

Incredible Interface

In the past few years, more customers than ever are accessing their advertisements and business websites via their mobile phones.

Think about it, how often are we really scrolling through our social media news feeds or doing random searches on desktop anymore? With that in mind, be absolutely positive that your business website design looks just as great on a mobile platform as it does on a computer layout. Sometimes not taking the time to check leads to your pages looking jumbled and having text out of place.

Another important piece of website design is to make sure your pages are still easy to scroll through and are engaging from top to bottom. Make it easy for customers to scroll from different tabs without opening a completely new window on their phone. Be sure to put yourself in the position of each of your users and test out every link and media from your dashboard, depending on what you’re designing your website with.

Many website online software today have powerful preview features for both laptop and mobile layouts to ensure each corner of your brand’s site looks the best it can.

Top Content

The first step is drawing in your customer to your site, but how are they kept there? This is the second biggest problem that many business websites face as they try to stay relevant, engaging, and consistent.

A truly effective website will post high quality content and media through concise pictures and videos that communicate your business’s mission honestly. Most customers are drawn away when a website begins to sound to sales-like and profit focused, so aim for authenticity at all times. Businesses like restaurants, consulting firms, or even digital services can all improve their customer base from this advice.

Focusing on a central color scheme and sharp visuals will help any consumer make the decision to begin a relationship with your business since it looks professional. Starting from the landing page, drop a trail of incentives for your customer to follow throughout the site, be it product recommendations, social media feeds, or video advertisements that help them realize your business can solve their need.

Search Engine Optimization

It’s important to make sure that your content is accessible when your customer tries to access it via a search engine. A put-together webpage can be a major plus for any type of business as it will naturally rank higher than an ugly and displeasing page.

Your design must be on the dot, and your off-page and on-page search engine optimization must also be strong for improved page visibility. Stuffing random keywords in your content where it sounds unnatural can backfire as your personal voice begins to seem inauthentic. Luckily, there are many more resources available to gain advice about how to tweak your website to improve the rankings.

One way to troubleshoot on-page optimization is to audit your internal website code. Designers who know how to build successful e-commerce pages have discovered that their internal page code must be completely in sync with popular search engines that most web browsers use. Easy tweaks as these that can be changed to gain a better page rating, like adding the same set of popular keywords, embedding links to related web pages and videos, and inviting guest bloggers to add inviting content themselves.

If you aim to improve your web page’s SEO, make sure to take a look at the full range of services from various website design firms. An experienced digital marketing company will test out every method to improve your website design, enhance your positioning for your customer base, and error proof your search engine algorithm. They know the importance of business website design for long-term success and will always pushing for new and enhanced techniques to help your business gain the attention it deserves!

Aromatherapy and meditation

When people think of relaxing, a few things cross their mind. Maybe someone’s idea of relaxing is lying down mindlessly watching TV, another person’s might be reading their favorite book, while others may prefer more physical activities such as yoga to calm their mind and body.

However, one type of peaceful meditation that a lot of people do not think about is aromatherapy. This is a great way to calm the body and mind using your sense of smell as essential oil fragrances are released into the air around you.

It is considered a very spiritual method of peaceful meditation, as it is tapping into one of your senses to try and calm your body down and, in some instances, cure it holistically.

Different types of aromatherapy

There are a couple different ways aromatherapy may be used. One of them is direct inhalation, where the fragrances are released into the environment. These scents are extracted from plants and using an oil diffuser will release these wonderful scents into the air for us to smell.

I have never tried aromatherapy myself, however from personal experience, when I am in an area where the smells are wonderful and I am allowed to relax, it definitely does bring a sense of peacefulness and serenity throughout my entire body.

Another method utilized in aromatherapy treatment is topological treatment where these oils are used on the skin in an attempt to further relax the body.

One example of this is when essential oils are used in massages. These essential oils are plant-based oils that are meant to relax the muscles of the body and release stress, pain, and tension from the muscles in the body.

Why you should try aromatherapy

There is never a golden rule when it comes to relaxation and peaceful meditation practices. Every individual is different and, therefore, there are a variety of ways people have found to connect them to their inner peace.

You never know what type of activity you may take a liking to or end up having a deep passion for until you try it. Therefore, giving aromatherapy a try is a great new way to find peace and tranquility and to see if it is something you would want to do more often in the future.

Many of my friends have tried it and love these types of relaxation practices and are big advocates that it really does help in the stress department.

How aromatherapy works

Aromatherapy works by first diffusing the scents in a manner your body is able to absorb. By inhaling these scents, it sends signals to the “smell” receptors in the nose which then process the information and communicate with parts of the brain which acts as a storehouse for memories and emotions.

Once the brain starts sensing these signals, research has shown the brain responds and stimulates certain physical, emotional and mental responses. Once this occurs, the relaxation process begins as the body starts to find that calm place and center itself on certain thoughts and emotions.

Aromatherapy for other use

Even though many people do not realize it or think to use it, aromatherapy can be a great way to help with a drug recovery process, or be used throughout one to ease the stress and trauma on the body as it goes through withdrawals.

It can be used as a substitute for the feelings the drugs once used to bring and hopefully help a person on their path to sobriety.

Final thoughts

Aromatherapy is widely accepted supplement to meditation and is something that everyone should at least try once. It may not be something you become majorly interested in, but there is nothing wrong with approaching every new idea with an open mind and giving all of the options out there a try!

Relapse prevention

Graduating from a drug or alcohol recovery program is definitely something to celebrate.

However, the journey does not end there for most addicts. Becoming clean or sober is one thing, however, staying that way after a history of substance abuse is another matter altogether.

It can be very hard for an addict to stay away from drugs and alcohol for an extended period as eventually, a relapse can happen. This is why so many addicts still need to learn effective relapse prevention coping skills and seek addiction and depression help, as some effects of relapse can become very harsh on their body if they have not used in a very long time.

No matter how long the time frame the addict has been away from the substance, there is always a small chance that an event or trigger could spark a relapse. They are used to having an intimate relationship with the substance they were abusing, which makes it a very easy and comfortable transition for them to fall right back into that dark routine they became so accustomed too.

How to avoid these pitfalls

There are a few ways that graduates of a rehab program can attempt to stay substance-free for the rest of their lives. One way is for them to fill the void the drug was filling for them with something completely different.

This could range from finding a new social group to hang out with that shares similar interests as you, or maybe meeting the person of their dreams and falling in love, maybe a new sport to keep them active and busy, maybe the new job they were waiting for hired them or they got a promotion, or even something as simple as picking up a new hobby.

There are definitely a lot of ways that people looking to stay away from the substances of their past can choose to go about it.

A great activity to pick up is yoga. There are so many benefits of yoga for men and women that it really is a smart choice when it comes to relapse prevention.

The dangers of a relapse

As we all know, alcohol and drug abuse is a dangerous thing to be involved with. These substances can take years off a healthy life expectancy and can even end life in the blink of an eye.

One incidence of an overdose or the wrong substance entering the body can cause it to not function and shut down at any given moment. This is why it is so crucial for someone that has chosen to become sober to try their best to keep it that way.

Once a relapse happens, it is an all too common occurrence for the user to slump back into their old habits and become addicted and reliant on the substance very quickly.

Furthermore, the second time someone comes into contact with the vicious cycle of substance abuse, it can be much harder to tear them away from it and keep them sober as they have experienced becoming reliant on it again and becoming comfortable with that.

Fighting to stay sober is a key part of the recovery process, which many do not take as seriously as they should. One friendly harmless drink to a previous alcoholic may not be that friendly and harmless in a few month’s time.

Hits close to home

As a student at college, you may always feel surrounded by the alcohol culture whether you like it or not. Every weekend there are parties and every weekend there are drunk people roaming the streets waiting to make some stupid comment or fall flat on their face from intoxication.

One of my best friends freshman year had many issues with alcohol dependency as the first semester went on and he became more and more accustomed to the drinking culture and how acceptable it is as. You can go out any night of the week and blend in, as there are always people out at the bars no matter what night you go out on.

As my friend became more absorbed with his drinking life, he stopped going to class and became a prisoner of his own thoughts. Every day he needed a drink to survive, without it, withdrawals would hit him hard and he needed a drink to get him back to a stable place.

Before long, he would be flat out intoxicated again.

It was a very sad time for our social group to see one of our close friends consumed like this by alcohol. We had all heard about the dangers of alcohol before stepping on campus but it didn’t hit home how real it was until it was right in front of us.

Eventually, when he went home for the summer, his parents and loved ones got him the attention he needed at a recovery program and they were able to get him back on the right path in life. Even years after we graduated he hasn’t touched a drink, but sometimes it is a constant battle for him not to go back.

I am just glad he has a great support group around him that make him strive to stay sober every day.