Exorbitant Cesarean Rates.

Attribution: Jurischk

Many of you have likely heard the statistic that one in three pregnant women will deliver via cesarean section. This statistic is true, however, the statistic that many of you haven't heard is that only about one in seven women actually need a cesarean. This discrepancy in suggested and actual cesarean rates has very little to do with the mothers and actually a lot more to do with the healthcare system that is advising their delivery. Here's a well-researched article on some of the things responsible for this unusual surgical trend, and how you can avoid being talked into a procedure that you may not actually need.

Four things to keep in mind when Homeschooling

A decision to begin homeschooling can be a hugely beneficial one. Now that your child's education is in your hands, you can ensure that they are receiving a thorough academic experience. It's a big responsibility, but your diligence and hard work early in their education can enable them to demonstrate greater academic autonomy as they grow. This is one of the reasons that homeschooling is so attractive to many parents -  teaching within your own home gives the "students" a comfortable environment that offers the flexibility to cater to each of their unique academic needs.

Attribution: Chris and Jenni

But now that you've made a decision against putting your children in a traditional school you need to actually use the new learning environment to optimize their performance. The truth is that the term "homeschool" is almost a misnomer in some cases: the word "school" typically conjures images of students being herded from stuffy room to stuffy room throughout the day as they sit through hours of lectures in cramped desks, lugging around backpacks that are roughly heavy as the students, themselves. "School" doesn't necessarily suggest academia, but rather the physical institution that  traditionally delivers academics. Homeschooling isn't school at all - the reason that you have decided toward homeschooling is likely because you want to be able to provide your kids with a well-rounded academic career without, well, the school. 

In order to take advantage of this educational method you will need to capitalize on the fact that this is not "school", as most people would consider it. That doesn't mean that there isn't any structure or discipline involved in the academic process, it just means that the environment and delivery of academic material is unique to your home. Here are some things that you should take into consideration to make your children's homeschooling experience a positive one:

Read

We know that your students will be spending a lot of their time in the books, but that doesn't excuse you from learning the same way. The fact is that the homeschooling process requires you to grow with your children as they mature intellectually. Homeschooling can, in some cases, be a decade-long endeavor, so you need to be as committed to your student's academic development as you are to their physical and emotional development when you are playing "Mom". The best way to grow and learn new approaches to education is to read. 

You are certainly not alone in wanting to homeschool your children, which means you are absolutely not the first person ever to do it. There have been scores of parents who have made the same decision that you have and, lucky for you, have decided to actually write about it. You can find some excellent resources on homeschooling at your local bookstore, so consider picking up some "How-To" literature to assist you with planning and creating a learning regimen for your kiddos. 

However, try to avoid books that suggest "This is how your child should learn" - the reason that you removed your child from the public education system in the first place was because you thought that you could do a better job addressing your student's unique academic needs. These type of one-size-fits-all learning approaches really have no way of understanding how your child will learn best. Instead, stick to supplementary materials that help you devise a course of action, but still require you to supply the bulk of the creativity.

Make unique educational plans

This might be the most exciting part about the homeschooling process. Once some great literature has helped you set up a general framework for your student's learning schedule you can decide how you want to adapt the actual content to best fit your child's interests.

Attribution: @Doug88888

Too often you hear the complaints of students in traditional school lamenting the surplus of boring material in their schedules. Don't get me wrong, I know that some necessary learning isn't very fun (we all need to learn how to write an essay some time), but this is where the school system fails to help students toward a curriculum that will direct them to a career field that they will enjoy. Homeschooling allows you to actually interact with your students and decide what would be the best way for him or her to receive a thorough education that will prepare them for an occupational field that they will love.

This process begins early - as early as possible is actually best. First, you'll need to pay attention to how your child learns best. There are generally three major types of learning styles: kinesthetic (tactile), auditory, and visual. Identifying these different learning styles among your children will help you start to provide them with more effective educational material and accustom you to the way that you will be teaching them in the coming years.

If these teaching styles are enforced consistently throughout your home curriculum, then your students will naturally begin to employ them as they become more independent in their studies. Additionally, being in-tune with their preferred learning styles can help them develop a more acute understanding of what they want from a profession. It's definitely going to require that you are more involved in each child's learning at the beginning, but it'll be worth it to see how your attention helps them grow into an academic lifestyle that they can be excited about.

Understand what your goals are

Of course, you want your student to be under your educational care because you aren't willing to entrust him or her to a (notoriously aloof) public school. That's wonderful, but you do need to be able to justify your decision with an academic approach that the public system can't provide.

Too many times you hear adults saying "I never used that after I left school", and it's absolutely true. The school system covers the student body in an educational blanket that designates (roughly) equal time to each of the major subjects. But your experience as a parent and an adult tells you that not everything that you've learned in school requires, or even deserves, an equal amount of attention. Before you start teaching your students you need to prune your educational approach of the material that you don't think will be integral to their growth, but also include material that you think is neglected in public education.

Attribution: crdtox

This is why there is often religious motivation for homeschooling children. The school system (at leas public school) isn't allowed to endorse or thoroughly address religious material. However, religious education is regarded by many families as an imperative part of academics, so parents of these families choose to homeschool their children to ensure that they receive sufficient religions education. This is just one example, but as the designer of the curriculum you are allowed to emphasize whatever subjects you think will be most beneficial to your student in the long run. Maybe you think that verbal and oral communication are important; maybe you want your child to have a math and science intensive curriculum; maybe you think that knowledge of our world's history and anthropology are fields that can lead to a solid education. 

Obviously you won't be limited to a curriculum that only features ONE area of focus (and you absolutely shouldn't), but these examples are just to illustrate the questions that you have to ask yourself when it comes to what your student will learn. Remember, just keeping them out of public school isn't enough - you have to be able to support that decision with an academic alternative.

Relax

Exploring both the academic and physical space that your home provides is important if you intend on allowing your children to get the most out of what you've provided. This means that you should adhere to a schedule when necessary, but allow your students the opportunity to enjoy some "extracurricular" activities, so to speak. Activities like cooking, physical activity, and (of course) leisurely reading should all be encouraged if your student is going to develop his or her own unique educational personality. 

This is also an opportunity to reinforce each student's particular learning styles: you might direct the visual learner toward a good historical documentary, the auditory learner to a great audiobook, or the kinesthetic learner to a small construction project. Allow their curiosity to be the primary tool in navigating toward some new material, but use your discretion to direct them away from things that are simply distractions.

As long as their behavior allows it, let them find space where they are going to learn most efficiently. Something like a portable lap desk provides your kids with mobility so that they can continue to study in their favorite nook or cranny in your home. Don't ever forget that your home provides a comfortable and stimulating environment for children to go on their individual intellectual journeys. Seize every opportunity to make your house the background that liberates your children from a dull, rigid educational career. 

Breast Cancer Awareness on Facebook

Surely you all remember the days when our inboxes weren’t as thoroughly fortified against spam as they are now, and we would be inundated with forwarded nonsense from our friends. Well – maybe our friends still send us junk mail, but it was a whole lot worse a few years ago. Most of these messages would make bizarre statements about life and luck, and require the use to forward it to ‘x’ amount of recipients for a proportionally large amount of good fortune.

Attribution: aglie

Younger people, in particular, will probably fondly recall the times when they would receive an Email urging them to hold their breath and make a wish for the duration of scrolling down to the bottom of the message. If the reader complied, they were assured that their adolescent crush would bloom into a life of love and happiness – so long as the message was forwarded to 40 more people.

These things are silly, right? Nobody actually believed that some inconsequential online activity like sending an Email could actually impact their future – that following the instructions of a piece of junk mail could make their dreams come true. None of us really believed these things, but I’m darn sure that every one of us participated anyway.

These little forwarded tidbits were just frivolous. Nobody was anything more than annoyed at them, because they had nothing to say: they weren’t newsworthy, they weren’t harmful, and they certainly weren’t ever taken seriously. Now we live in a different age: the age of social media. Whereas we used to sit back and experience online community more passively, these new modes of communication are enabling us to assimilate and spread not just spam, but serious ideas about the things that have meaning to us. But despite the fact that our communicative avenues have changed, our online interests and activities still have not.

For some time now, there has been this little ‘game’ circulating the social webspace. The game urges women, and women only, to post arbitrary words on their walls that represent their relationship statuses. The words serve as a sort of code that only women on the mailing list would understand: BLUEBERRY=single; PINEAPPLE=it’s complicated; APPLE=engaged. Presumably this would just be a meaningless effort to engender camaraderie among a nebulous online community of females, but the game goes a step further. It operates under the guise of primarily serving to raise awareness about breast cancer.

The game seems innocuous enough, but it has a lot of people enormously offended by how it unintentionally mitigates the seriousness of breast cancer and how it affects communities everywhere. Rather than distributing educational, meaningful education about the disease, these people are convinced that they are showing their support on a very real, very austere subject through these basic little code words.

Attribution: Novopress

Nevertheless, people still participate. A previous effort used types of underwear as the code words that translated to a person’s relationship status brought the Facebook initiative national attention through news coverage. People just can’t resist this petty little online pathos and, in turn, feel obligated to take part in it. This is why our early-internet mindset can still do some harm and create offense with the new ways that we communicate. We are now able to reach and influence so many more people online, but we still prefer to engage the flimsy, meaningless stuff as opposed to the robust, meaningful material that can help us enact change and awareness about an issue.

People are even criticizing the game for its sexism, as it is an activity reserved strictly for the female community. Although women represent the vast majority of cancer victims, there are still men who develop breast cancer, not to mention the countless men who have lost a spouse, daughter, mother, or friend to the illness – this game isn’t conducive to corporate solidarity within the breast cancer community because it neglects to include a huge population that the disease regularly affects.

The truth is that breast cancer absolutely not a game. It is a distressing reality that looms over our generation and every generation to come if we fail to generate real awareness that leads to a solution. Breast cancer can and will affect us, which means that we need to be equally as tenacious when it comes to education and prevention. Places like Frisco Women’s Health are determined to help inform about and prevent the disease in our community. We need to know that sufficient breast cancer awareness does not come from our Facebook news feeds.

Sometimes Fitness Makes Us Forget

The summer is looming ever-nearer, which means that the idea of fitness and healthy eating is weighing heavily on the back of our minds. We're going to start thinking what things we should start putting into our diet to help burn off some pounds but, more importantly, what we should start taking out.

Sometimes we end up taking too much out, though - and we remove certain things in our diet at the expense of our overall health. Our sights are set on looking good in the next few months, but we disregard how our eating decisions are going to impact or health down the road.

This article from RealFrisco details four essential things - fiber, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids, and folate - that we need to start introducing into our bodies to ensure our health as we age. These things can be found in different foods, but can also be in the form of multivitamins, making it super easy to include them in our daily routine.

The focus of the article is prioritizing your overall health over rigorous fitness routines. Of course it's great to look thin and be able to exercise for hours, but we aren't always going to be as active as we are now, and need to be start making some decisions about how we will take care of our future selves.

Attribution: SOCIALisBETTER

Keeping Your Weight Loss Resolution

Most of you probably made the obligatory weight loss resolution this past New Year's, but by now your determination might be waning. It's no surprise - being bundled up out in the cold doesn't make you think as hard about your physique as donning a bathing suit for the first time all year. But summertime is going to be here before you know it, and you want to make sure that you're looking your best when it comes time to show some skin at the pool.

If you still have a strong desire to lose weight, but just need a little bit of extra motivation, you might want to consider medically-assisted weight loss as an option. You'll be monitored by a physician through your weight loss program, and he'll determine what kind of a meal plan and pharmaceutical supplements will be best for your body. Here's some information on the types of things you can expect from a medical weight loss program. Make this the last year that you promise yourself a new body!

Photo attribution: Green Heat

Contraceptive Options For Women

While some women are desperately trying to conceive, some no longer want to have more kids. This of course is a decision every family needs to make because for one, raising up to three children is difficult not to mention expensive.

Today there are many choices for birth control. Frisco OB GYN Dr. Weinstein states, “Women no longer have to deal with the annoying side effects of their regular birth control pills or worry about long lasting side effects.”

What are your options?

Women usually ask their gynecologists which is the best form of birth control. The short answer is there is no such thing as the best birth control method because each has its advantages and disadvantages. What gynecologists know is that couples have the ability to control whether or not they want to become parents or when they will conceive. Choosing a birth control method is never easy since there are a lot of things to take into consideration that is why it is always a good idea for you to talk to your doctor about it. Before choosing a particular method you should think about the following: your general health, how often you engage in sexual intercourse, the number of sexual partners, wanting kids one day or not wanting them at all, effectiveness of the method of choice, possible side effects, and how comfortable you will be with a certain method. It is interesting to note that most birth control methods also fail –nothing works 100% but of course, your chances of conceiving is at their lowest if you use birth control.

Types of Birth Control

Abstinence –In some nations specifically religious ones, abstinence is encouraged. If you have the discipline and the right conditioning to be abstinent until the time you decide to have a child, then this is the perfect method for you.

Natural Family Planning – If you do not really want anything inserted in your vaginal region or do not want to take contraceptive pills, natural family planning is the way to go. One has to note however that even if your menstruation is regular and you know when you are most fertile, this cycle can change and in turn will change the days where it is safest to have sex without conceiving.

Barrier Methods – Putting up a block or a barrier in your vagina to keep sperm from entering is also another birth control method. This includes the use of contraceptive sponges, cervical caps, female condoms, and male condoms.

Hormonal Methods – This involves pregnancy prevention by interfering with ovulation. The use of oral contraceptives is the most popular in this category. However, the pill isn’t a good idea for women who smoke, are older than 35, have a history of cancer, and blood clots. The use of antibiotics will also reduce the effectiveness of pills. Shots and injections, patches, and vaginal rings are also popular hormonal birth control methods.

Implantable Devices – These devices are implanted or inserted in the body. IUDs or intrauterine devices, for example, prevent sperm from entering this part of the body or release progestin to keep sperm from reaching the egg. Implantable rods are also another choice.

Permanent Birth Control – For those who no longer want to have kids, sterilization is a good choice. Essure is a good example of non-invasive birth control. Another type is surgical sterilization in women. Vasectomy is another way but this is specific for men.

Conceiving: Causes of Infertility in Women and Solutions

Getting pregnant as a concept has been over simplified by society according to healthcare professionals who have seen many couples struggle to conceive. The process of conception to birth is an complex one to the point that it can even be mind-boggling. With every intricate process whatever process this may be, it is but natural for things to go wrong. On the infertility front, there is a long list of causes that fertility professionals have to deal with. One has to know that sometimes the causes are found relatively quick and also have solutions that are relatively easy. There are those times when doctors cannot find what is wrong.

Female Infertility

One cause of female infertility are hormonal imbalances including those that result in flawed egg development or ovulatory dysfunction. Other causes include ovulatory disorders, damage in the fallopian tube, pelvic adhesions, among others.

General Health

The general health of a woman trying to conceive is also taken into consideration when testing for infertility. Your age for example is a very big factor because a woman’s reproductive ability somehow diminishes when they turn 35. Your diet also plays a vital role when trying to conceive since body cells cannot do their functions properly when in a toxic environment. This means that women trying to conceive should not take in too much caffeine and should eat a balanced diet. Vitamin C deficiency and other nutritional deficiencies can also affect one’s ability to be with child. Of course, it is needless to say that alcohol or drug dependency will not result to the healthy environment that body cells need to survive. Alcohol and drugs makes for poor health and according to experts usually causes infertility. A woman’s lifestyle is also something one should take into consideration. If you are too stressed out, always lack sleep or do not do the right amount of exercise, your ability to conceive can be affected as well.

Solutions

The solution differs from one woman to the next which means that solutions are tailored fit for each woman trying to conceive. If you’ve tried and still have no success conceiving there are doctors dedicated to fertility preservation. Frisco has the best fertility specialists with onsite labs to increase chances of conception. If you have questions concerning infertility, the specialists at Frisco Institute for Reproductive Medicine can certainly answer them. Frisco is fortunate enough to have their practice here. Their own, Dr Mehta was recently named a RISING STAR for 2012 by Texas Super Doctors!