Gone Keeps Your Tattoo Sharp and Vibrant

Tattoo Healing Process
While a tattoo is an exciting method of self-expression, a tattoo is also a wound. During tattooing a needle pierces your skin thousands of times, depositing a foreign substance - ink - below the skin. This process usually results in bleeding, as the body attempts to push ink and other contaminants out of the wound and create a scab so that it can heal beneath it. Keeping your tattoo safe and free from contamination and infection means keeping the tattoo covered and thus preventing debris and germs from entering this wound. But allowing your tattoo to heal with all of the color and desired appearance intact also means that you need to prevent scab formation. You can accomplish both of these goals, allowing your tattoo to heal quickly and safely but also with the best appearance possible, by using a revolutionary new moist wound healing gel called Wound-Be-Gone. This gel is the perfect answer to keeping your tattoo color bright and the lines sharp, showing off your body art for a lifetime.
Caring for Your New Tattoo
The key to proper healing of your tattoo is to keep it clean and safe from contamination, while also maintaining a moist healing environment. Obviously, keeping your tattoo clean prevents disease and infection. What you may not know is that keeping your tattoo moist throughout the healing process prevents your body from forming a scab. This healing without a scab is good because scab healing allows for more bleed out of ink and promotes development of scar tissue. By keeping your tattoo moist 24 hours a day until the skin is completely healed you ensure that the new skin grown over your tattoo is healthy, and not full of scar tissue, which would diminish the appearance and color of your tattoo. It is also important to note that scar tissue does not tattoo well. Thus, if scar tissue does form you cannot simply have an artist tattoo over it to correct the color. If a tattoo's appearance is damaged through improper healing there is little that can be done to correct it. Instead, you need to keep the tat moist from the start, to minimize growth of such tissue, and to ensure that the initial healing happens quickly and efficiently. The proper healing gel can make this healing process fast and easy.
Wound-Be-Gone® is a patented healing gel that provides optimal healing power. Though extremely powerful and known to help heal even the most severe wounds, Wound-Be-Gone® is available without a prescription, and is perfect for healing various household injuries - especially tattoos!
When considering tattoo aftercare there are a number of products on the market. This abundance of options may leave you wondering what makes Wound-Be-Gone® a better choice. You may also have question about whether Wound-Be-Gone® will clog your skin pores or cause allergic reactions, or how often you should apply Wound-Be-Gone.® The answers are simple, and the choice is very important, so keep on reading.
The Deficiencies in Other Options
Bacitration and Neosporin are popular tattoo aftercare products, as are Vaseline and other specifically marketed tattoo gels. However, healing products such as Bacitration and Neosporin contain antibiotics. For most wounds and tattoos, these antibiotic properties are unnecessary. Assuming you chose a well established, reputable tattoo artist, your art should be mostly clean and free of bacteria. The gel that the artist applies immediately after the tattoo will kill any minor surface bacteria, and simple cleansing after the initial tattoo is done will remove airborne contaminants; no further antibiotic is necessary. In fact, overuse of topical antibiotics can cause you problems in the future, so antibiotic gels are not the best choice for the 7 - 14 days that it takes a tattoo to heal.
Vaseline and other petroleum based products are not good either. While they will help keep the wound moist, they contain petroleum derivatives which are not healthy for the wound and do not provide the proper environment for healing. Specifically designed tattoo goo's and gels do help provide moist healing, but that is all they do.

Preventing Shoulder Injuries in Youth Athletes

Youth sports injuries can end an athletic career before it ever has a chance to begin, and yet few parents are aware of steps their young athletes can take to help avoid injury. Likewise, many athletes and parents are unaware that some of the most severe, and preventable, injuries are of the "non-contact" variety.
Non-contact injuries are injuries that occur without direct contact and include overuse injuries, ankle sprains, and the majority of shoulder injuries. These injuries become surgical issues because alterations in joint mechanics and muscle tension result in overload and tearing of the shoulder joint structures.
So just what should concerned parents and young athletes be doing to prevent these injuries? Start with a preventative evaluation and then make a comprehensive warm-up routine part of every athletic outing.
Preventative Evaluation
Going beyond the basic pre-participation sports physical, a 30 - 60 minute evaluation can assist in identifying your young athlete's strengths and weaknesses along with establishing a baseline for future comparison in the event of sports related pain or injury. It's important to establish this starting point so it will be easier to track healing and recovery.
Warm Ups Help Prevent Injuries
One of the most common complaints reported among young athletes is shoulder injuries, so this article, and several others to follow, will focus on those injuries. The good news is, as your youth athlete takes to the field, there are some things you can do to assist in preventing shoulder injuries.
One of the most important parts of practice, the warm-up is often under stressed. Often times coaches instruct their players to go warm up and players are left to use their own judgement in to assess when they are ready to play. As a result, the youth tend to discredit the warm-up and spend time chatting instead of properly warming up. It is important that these athletes be instructed on proper warm up stretching and throwing protocols. This is especially important during the early season and spring league games.
But you may be surprised to learn that warm ups should ideally begin well before the season does. Players should begin throwing at least one to two months prior to the start of practice. This will ensure that arm strength and endurance is appropriate and will decrease the occurrence of the injuries caused by fatigue. Just taking the time to get outside or within a facility is important, it would be much better to follow a tiered plan designed to assist in increasing arm strength and endurance. The following is a suggested program designed to have you ready for the season. Remember that soreness may be normal when beginning any program, but taking an extra day off when this occurs is important. It is also suggested that a pitcher be able to complete this program prior to setting foot on the mound.
Interval Throwing Program
The Interval Throwing Program is a safe program to follow if you have had a shoulder injury or a long layoff from throwing competitively. Throwers who are returning to throwing after injury or getting ready to start the season should follow the interval-throwing program, exactly, on an every-other-day basis. The criteria to progress from step to step are that the throwing session was pain free and there is no residual soreness the next day. For throwers who are free of injury, but returning to throwing after a lay-off period, follow the interval-throwing program, on an every-other-day basis, without the rest periods. You should use the 'crow-hop' method for each throw when performing the interval throwing session. The 'crow-hop' method consists of first a hop, then a skip, followed by the throw. This method helps simulate the throwing act, allowing emphasis on total body mechanics involved in the act of throwing. The path of the ball should be an arcing trajectory, not on a flat line trajectory. You should avoid throwing flat-footed to avoid placing excess stress on the throwing shoulder in your training program.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this program or the best course of exercise for your particular sport, position, or injury, contact a sports medicine chiropractor for more information.

Visit a Hearing Center to Learn About How You Hear

A hearing center is a location that specializes in providing testing and services for individuals experiencing a loss or with other types of concerns with the functional aspects of their ears. Though you may not think about them often, the ears are incredibly important for so much beyond just the ability to hear. They also control your balance, for example. When you begin to be unable to hear what others are saying, it may be time to turn to a professional at a hearing center to find out what is happening.
How the Ear Works
The ear's inner workings are amazing. The actual process of hearing starts when sound waves reach the internal structures inside the ear. The vibrations from the sound waves are converted at that point into signals sent through the nerves. The brain recognizes those signals and assigns them a specific description. This is how you know the difference between the sound of a car horn and singing.
There are three main portions of the ear: the outer portion, which is most recognizable as the ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. Each portion has a different job to do in the process of interpreting sound waves. When sound waves approach the ear, they are passed from the outer portion into the inner portion. This creates vibrations on the eardrum. The middle ear has three very small bones. These amplify the vibrations significantly, as they travel into the inner ear. Then, the vibrations continue even further into the cochlea. This structure holds fluid and connects the nerve cells to the ear. These nerve endings are very tiny hairs. There are thousands of them present in this area. They help translate the sounds of the vibrations into electrical signals. Your brain then receives these electrical signals and can interpret the vibrations into the sounds they actually are. Different sound vibrations have a different effect on these tiny hairs.
Damage
Often, there is damage to some portion of this structure that limits the transmission of sound into the ear and through the various portions so you can interpret it. As people age, various components of the inner workings of the ear can break down, leading to a loss of hearing ability.
In some cases, it is possible to restore some or all of a person's ability to hear by simply helping to amplifying sound. This can bee done by using a device placed inside the ear. By visiting a hearing center, you can learn more about this process, as well as what you can expect from the use of such a device. Doctors can help determine which portion is not working well and fit you for a device to improve sound quality in some situations.