Diabetes can affect muscles and joints of your hands.

When you hear about complications of diabetes, you usually hear about your heart, eyes, kidneys, nerves, and feet. But diabetes can affect muscles and joints of your hands, too.

Diabetes related hand conditions are usually not life-threatening, but they can have a great impact on quality of your life.

Poor blood sugar control is thought to play a major role in diabetes-related musculoskeletal disorders of hands. The theory is that high blood sugars change amount and character of protein and collagen in your tissues, leading to damage of small blood vessels.

Is Technology Robbing our Kids of Good Health? Today's kids are technologically smarter than we were at their age, but in some homes technology seems to have taken control of our children's lives. Many parents don't realize underlying effect it's having on their children's health.

Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear a news report on childhood obesity. With our children coming home from school, sitting in front of computer or spending time playing video games it's no wonder obesity is on rise. This being said, there is another problem that many parents may be overlooking.

Each year, reports pertaining to number of bone fractures in children are made public. Each year, those numbers rise. Some reports attribute increase in broken bones to an overload of sugar from too much soda. This may indeed be a contributing factor, but I believe improper calcium balance may be real cause.

Calcium balance is particularly important in our childhood years when we are growing. Over 98% of calcium is found in our bones and teeth. Our bodies rely on vitamin D and weight bearing exercise to help keep calcium levels intact. Weight bearing exercise includes any activity in which your feet and legs carry your own weight. Some good examples include:

* Walking * Running * Jumping Rope * Dancing * Climbing Stairs * Jogging * Aerobic Dancing * Hiking * Inline Skating/ice skating * Racquet sports * Team Sports such as soccer, Basketball, field hockey, volleyball and softball or baseball. These are a few of exercises that can help to build strong bones. Staying in house and playing video baseball, instead of hitting a real Little League home run, is robbing our children of sunlight.