vacations help to destress and give relaxation to your muscles and brain

Still others benefit by arrangements that allow them to enjoy a series of four-day or five-day vacations, taken perhaps four times the more each year. 1f it is possible for you to have such flexibility, it could be well worth-while. 

Before You Go on Vacation It's a good idea to see your doctor before you go off on an extended vacation-so you won't have to see him after it is over. In fact, just before a vacation can be an especially suitable time for having your regular periodic checkup.

For one thing, your doctor can tell you how much and what kind of exercise you should undertake. If he finds you are not in condition to climb mountains or play tennis, you can select a place where you won't be tempted to engage in such activities. You will have more fun perhaps lying on a beach or sitting in a boat pulling in fish. 

Deciding where to go on your vacation can be important if you have a health problem such as hay fever, for example. Your doctor can advise about avoiding certain places at certain seasons. If you have a heart or lung problem, he can advise about altitudes and their possible effects.

Tell your physician not only where you plan to go but how you will get thereby train, plane, ship, or car. If you have any tendency to motion sickness, your physician can prescribe medication to help prevent it. Depending upon where you plan to go and the availability there of medical facilities, your physician may suggest that you take along a first-aid kit. 

A minimum one, under some conditions, might include the following items, and your physician can provide prescriptions for those that require them: Aspirin-for headache, fever, muscle aches and pains Antiseptic, such as hydrogen peroxide, tincture of iodine, or benzalkonium chloride Skin lotion-to protect against sunburn and windburn Anti-Nauseant for motion sickness Antacid-for mild stomach upset Sedative for emotional upset, overstimulation, or nervous upset Broad-spectrum antibiotic-effective against a wide range of bacteria, in case of serious illness; to be selected by your physician and used precisely as he instructs container of small bandages Sterilized gauze squares Roll of adhesive tape, one-half inch wide A pectinkaolate compound such as Kaopectate, or paregoric, or Lomotil for diarrhea and "tourist trots" 

How Much Sleep is essential? Age and timings of sleep

HOW MUCH SLEEP?

 Sleep is essential, but the amount required varies. The usual sleeping time for the adult is eight hours, but some people need less, some need more. Everyone has heard the story of Thomas A. Edison sleeping only two hours a night-and the romantic picture of Edison working on through the night to invent the electric light bulb suggests that any of us, strong willed enough, could cut down on sleep and have more time to become famous and rich. The fact is that Edison, though protesting that sleep was a loss of time and opportunity, was concerned about getting his own quota of sleep, according to his own diaries.

He napped often, and frequently drifted back to sleep for another hour or so after waking in the morning. Some physicians are firmly convinced that if shortchanging yourself on sleep does not catch up with you quickly, it will, and there will come the day when you suddenly appear to lose your energy, become prone to ailments, and suffer a general deterioration of health. There is no simple answer to the question of how much sleep is best. The essential test is whether you feel rested in the morning and have enough energy to carry on the day's activities.

Eight hours, as we have noted, is an average figure. If you do very heavy physical work or extremely exacting mental work, you may need more. Children need more sleep than adults since they are growing fast and are very active. Old people often have been thought to need less sleep; this is not necessarily true. They may need more, depending upon their activity and health. It could be a most worthwhile exercise to make your own investigation into your sleep needs, on the simple basis of experimenting to determine how much sleep makes you feel good, how much less makes you feel out of sorts, irritable, fatigued. 

Excercises and Muscle activity - Benefits and precautions.

In addition, the well-exercised body requires a smaller amount of muscle activity for a given physical performance than the untrained body. Many studies indicate not only a lower incidence of heart attacks among the physically active than among the sedentary but also a greater likelihood, when a heart attack does occur, for the physically active per- son to recover. One possible reason is that exercise appears to promote the development of supplementary blood vessels which can take over the burden of nourishing the heart muscle when a coronary artery is blocked in a heart attack. 

In a recent study to try to explain why physical exercise may ward off heart attacks, investigators at the University of Oregon Medical School and radioactively tagged cholesterol to animals. Because of the tagging, they could follow what happened to the cholesterol. (It is a high level of blood cholesterol that is thought to foster development of atherosclerosis, the pile-up of fatty deposits on blood vessel walls that may shut down blood flow to the heart muscle, producing a heart attack.)

The Oregon workers found that the more the animals exercised, the more cholesterol was broken down; the less exercise, the higher the levels of cholesterol in the blood. In Israel recently, a special program of activity has been set up for men who have had actual heart attacks. 

In the program, exercise is gradually intensified until it becomes quite vigorous, including jogs along the Mediterranean Sea. The program is carried out under close medical super- vision. Dr. Daniel Brunner, its director and Associate Professor of Physiological Hygiene at Tel Aviv University, reports that many of the patients now are more fit than before their heart attacks-and more fit than non-trained people of their age who have not had coronary artery disease.

ACTIVITY AT ANY AGE That even elderly people, men in their 70's, can regain much of the vigor and physical function of their 40's through carefully planned physical activity has been demonstrated by a University of Southern California investigator. In the program, in which exercise is prescribed with the same care as a physician prescribes medications, 69 men aged 50 to t\7 have been working out one hour three times a week. 

Their closely supervised regimen includes calisthenics, stretching, swimming, and jog- at the end of one year, these were the results expressed in terms of: blood pressure improved by 6 percent; body fat 4.8 percent; oxygen consumption increased by 9.2 percent;  

 arm strength increased by 7.2 percent; and nervous tension reduced by 14 percent. It would be an invitation to disaster for older people and, for that matter, for younger people to rush pell-mell into vigorous activity after long years of sedentary living without having a thorough physical checkup first and without undertaking activity on a gradual, progressive basis under medical supervision. But there is growing support now for the concept that proper physical activity can help the aged and can even delay the aging process, prolonging the active years, retarding and possibly helping to avoid some degenerative diseases.