Health Tips for a Better Life

How to Get the Most From Online Deals

Do you know AajkaCatch? Daily deal sites are all the rage these days. The massive success of one day deals has inspired a wave of similar web sites all offering deep discounts on everything from fashion to travel, dining, entertainment and beauty. Even Facebook couldn’t resist. The social network recently launched its own service called Deals.

But buyers need to beware. About 20% of daily deal consumers end up wasting their vouchers and never redeeming the deal. The problem is that daily deal sites encourage consumers to buy on impulse. We see the time clock ticking on the site, telling us we only have two hours left to buy a deal for 80% off teeth whitening or 50% off acupuncture, and our adrenaline starts to flow. We click the “buy” button without really thinking rationally. It happens to the best of us.

Experts say one way to maximize the daily deal market is to buy with your friends. If you work it out the right way, you’ll all get a discount, or at least one of you will.

Daily Deals Attract New Customers, Re-engage the Inactive

Daily-deal offers may be an effective way to attract new customers and re-engage inactive ones, according to a new study by Foresee Results: Among surveyed consumers who had redeemed a daily-deal offer in the previous 90 days, nearly one-third (31%) said they were new customers and more than one-quarter (27%) said they were infrequent customers.

Nearly two in five consumers who had redeemed a daily-deal offer (38%) said they were frequent customers; 4% were former customers.

· Daily deals is an evolved customer behaviour that has migrated a significant bunch of offline backbenchers into online transacters. Its a great trend that can be customized geographically. However there are few questions:-
Q1. Besides daily SMS / Emailer which can get annoying, is there a better medium to reinforce online offers?
Q2. What product categories do better business online?

· But how many become return/loyal customers, without the deals? Isn’t that you really want?

· Daily deals are a good way to get people through the front door, but not a guarantee you’ll develop a new customer base. Business owners who think that a daily deal is going to just drop a slew of loyal customers into their lap are in for a big surprise.

There is a real problem. It is called medicalization, i.e. the process of taking something entirely natural and converting it into a disease or disorder that can then be cured by doctors (usually men). We have now reached the point where every part of the female reproductive cycle has been redefined so as to require treatment (how very caring and patriarchal of the men). It starts in puberty, goes through menstruation, infects the processes of fertility, conception and birth, and pursues aging women into the menopause. The most obvious continuing “problem” is premenstrual tension (sometimes referred to as a “syndrome” to make it sound more like a deadly disease). This affects all women to some degree with a small percentage being so badly affected they must take time off work. We have now reached the point where PMS is socially constructed as a disorder, i.e. doctors have brainwashed women into believing most of the symptoms associated with menstruation constitute a disorder. The approaches to treatment begin with reassurance and what is politely called counseling. It seems women need to be taught coping strategies so they can get on with their lives. Diet and nutrition are changed. Calcium and other substances are added. Hormones are administered in the desire to re-establish the right balance, and diuretics reduce the water retention. If all this dramatic cycle of medical effort fails, we are then into classifying this as the more serious Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and the treatments begin with the more powerful antidepressants, reflecting the fact that the mind as well as the body are obviously disordered.

Finding it difficult to swim against the cultural tide and feeling that they should “do” something, some women have been turning to alternative methods. These range from relaxation techniques, through yoga and other forms of physical exercise, to acupuncture. Acupuncture is perhaps the most interesting because it has the longest medical track record as a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Throughout China and South East Asia, women routinely go for acupuncture to relieve the cramps associated with menstruation. It is deeply embedded into local culture as the safe and effective way of treating the discomfort or pain. Unfortunately, women in the West are more skeptical and such formal research as exists for the use of acupuncture in the US and Europe finds no clear evidence of benefit.

All of which brings us to the simple approach. There is no need to treat menstruation as any different from all other causes of discomfort or pain. If you experience low intensity pain, you take one of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. If the pain is moderate to severe, you buy tramadol online and take that. There is no need to suffer – martyrdom should not be a part of your psychological make-up. The standard painkillers are all that is needed in the majority of cases. Should this prove ineffective, it will be evidence of a more serious underlying cause that genuinely does need investigation by your regular healthcare professional. It is possible that all you need is a different painkiller, but a check-up, if necessary by a specialist, should identify the cause of the pain and recommend treatment for the genuine disease or disorder. Otherwise, stay with the conventional painkillers or, if you want something slightly different, try tramadol apap – a combination drug that some people find easier on the stomach.

There is always a point where science collides with belief systems and sparks fly. Looking around the US right now, the continuing confrontation over the teaching of evolution is a classic example. At a slightly lower level of intensity is the continuing conflict between the “hard science” doctors and those who are persuaded that there are alternative approaches to treatment with equally good outcomes. Take acupuncture as an example. This comes out of nearly two thousand years of medical experience in China. Even though some of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) methods have been displaced in favor of Western methods, the healthcare service in many Asian and ASEAN countries continues to rely on acupuncture as an effective treatment for a range of different problems. Putting TCM to one side, there are also major claims made for different forms of meditation. Some are explicitly rooted in religions. Others are directly adapted to the management of pain. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment and the adoption of the scientific method by Western doctors leads them to a quick dismissal of everything not backed up by their science. Even when shown perfectly respectable research proving some of the claims for “unscientific” methods, they still refuse to even consider them. Their prejudices are deep-seated.

In the case of meditation, there is a growing body of Western-based research using the scientific method which shows excellent outcomes when people suffering from chronic pain are taught how to meditate. In essence, the point is to change the attitude of people towards their pain. Put another way: the level of intensity of the pain stays the same but the people change their emotional reaction to it. At some level, this represents a form of intellectual distraction. People are trained how to disconnect themselves from the pain and to search for ways to live their lives without worrying about it. Too often, people allow the pain to dominate their every waking moments. They fear the pain will always be there and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that blights their lives. Avoiding this fear and focussing instead on positive ways to cope with the reality of the pain allows people to rebuild their daily lives and to function more effectively.

There is an old saying: give a starving man a fish and he eats well that night, but teach him how to fish and he can eat well every night. Teaching people how to meditate is the latter. It gives them a path to follow for the rest of their lives. For some there is a problem. It’s not a quick fix. rather it relies on them to invest time and effort into solving their own problems. At first, there may be a place for painkillers and tramadol is probably the best for relieving moderate to severe pain. But as people begin to feel the benefit flowing from this new discipline for the mind, the need for drugs will diminish. The ideal is to live without the help of any drug. If your private health insurance includes meditation for pain management, get an early appointment. If you have some savings, it is a good investment. Otherwise, buy tramadol. It will give you relief while the healthcare service catches up with the best research.