Mood:  a-ok

The mind is a truly wonderful body part. It receives and generates data all day and night long. It controls processes and functions within the body automatically without conscious thought. It keeps the heart pumping and the lungs functioning. It stores information, retrieves information and continually mixes information around (often without mixing it up!) leading to creativity and solutions to problems.

All of these tasks are just some of the things the brain is capable of. If the brain were a corporation, it would take hundreds of people to do all of the things that just one brain is capable of. It is magnificent! With a control centre like the human brain, it is conceivable that the human race is capable of equal greatness, right? That would stand to reason, wouldn't it? Perhaps this would be a true statement if the brain were fuelled perfectly and given only pure and true information. Unfortunately, we do not get perfect food and we do not get perfect information and the mind also almost seems to have a life of its own.

With a thought generated by a brain, many conveniences have been created. So many creations started with the wisp of a thought swirling around in someone's brain. Thoughts pop seemingly randomly into our heads all day and night long. Brains are influenced by all the information received. Our thoughts are influenced by what we see - with our external eyes and with our mind's eye, what we hear, what we feel both emotionally and physically also what we feel physically both internally and externally. There is a vast quantity of information coming in from a vast variety of sources and the brain has to make sense of it all and form rational, coherent thoughts and conclusions. Even before we are born the brain starts receiving information. It struggles to organize and make sense of it all.

Bombarded with information all day and night, every day, day after day after day. It's a wonder that the brain keeps receiving information, keeps regulating all the unconscious and necessary bodily functions as well as it does. Even with failing nutrition and harmful substances imposed on it, it functions amazingly well, all day and night, every day, day after day after day. This, of itself, should be enough for people to give kudos and thanks to this amazing body part. It should be enough to spur us to take care of this amazing body part given all the work and how hard it works to manage and regulate functions, feelings physical and emotional, internally and externally, and yet we take it for granted. We largely ignore it until there seems to be something 'wrong' with it. Until it is keeping us up at night, until it seems to control our every sleeping and waking moment, running like a wild horse with the bit in its teeth or incessantly chattering like a monkey in overdrive and then we feel hopeless and helpless to the little tyrant inside our skulls.

We get to this point of despair and we think - yes, we think still with that thing that seems to have turned into the enemy - what can I do? Why is one of my best body parts betraying me. It should be obvious but maybe it isn't at first. The brain needs a break. The brain needs discipline and the brain, as funny as it sounds, needs to know who is the boss of it. It may appear that the brain is the boss of everything but really, there is a higher awareness, a higher consciousness just right above the brain. This consciousness often sits and watches all that is going on. It doesn't usually say too much, it mainly observes but it is there to give the brain some well deserved R&R, the catch is, you have to ask it to step in and help you out.

Wow, this is great, right? Your brain is running around in circles, it is tired, it is stressed out, it is in over drive, it is a wild and undisciplined horse or monkey, maybe both, AND there is a built in solution. Just ask the 'overseer' to cover. Easy! You'll do it right now, won't you? So you do.

"Please mighty overseer, help me rest my brain and deal with this stress. Please make the crazy, frenetic thoughts stop whirling around in my head. Please give me a break."

That ought to do it. You wait. Nothing is happening. You wait. Still nothing. You give it about 10 more seconds because that's all you can stand really. Then your brain starts screaming again. "Stupid overseer, I knew it wouldn't work, it's not really there, it doesn't really do anything at all. Mother was right if you want anything done you've got to do it yourself." And you're back on the vicious cycle. The brain is back in its tyrannical role, barking out orders, sizing up situations, taking care of business.

You're disappointed. You were really looking forward to feeling less stressed. You really thought that it could work. You must have been wrong, the overseer does not exist. What other explanation could there be?

Ask yourself another question. How much of a chance did you give the overseer? Half a minute? You're brain has been over worked for years and you expected the overseer to fix all of that in 30 seconds? Really??

Try again. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for at least 20 minutes. Make yourself comfortable. Make sure you will be warm - bring a blanket, warm socks or a sweater. Make sure you will feel safe - lock a door if you need to. Get into position, seated or laying down. Ask again.

"Okay, overseer, I need a break, take over!" Now wait, but really wait. Let your mind go blank. A thought will come, push it back where it came from. Wait some more. Another thought will come. Bat it away. Thoughts will keep trying to push themselves to the front of your consciousness - DON'T LET THEM. You may need to be tenacious in your effort to keep the thoughts away. Soon you will notice the overseer suggests that you take a longer breath in and let the breath out slowly. It won't do it with a recognizable thought. Your lungs will respond. You will notice your heart rate is a little slower, again, that's the overseer. You will also notice - eventually - that your brain DOES relax and let go. This is where you will find the rest that it needs.

Spend the whole 20 minutes taking the break. Even if the thoughts never completely disappear. Stay with it. As often as a thought comes you send it away. With practice, not putting expectations or goals on the amount of time it takes to "get results", the thoughts will not try to come any more. You will rest.

To begin, visualize, forming only pictures in your mind, a vast nothingness. Let yourself float there in complete stillness not thinking, not worrying, not talking in your head to yourself, not planning, not scheming. At first it may help to draw pictures in your head. You are floating on a cloud. There is fog all round. Picture the fog, see it in your mind. Your body becomes part of the fog. The fog is everything, contains everything. The fog is nothing and emptiness. Everything and nothing. You are the fog. You are everywhere, everything and everyone. You expand without limit. You melt into nothingness.

At first it will be challenging to push the thoughts away but with practice you will achieve this more easily. If possible, set aside 20 minutes at the same time each week to start. As you practice week by week you may add more sessions. Like any exercise, as a general rule, the more you get the more it benefits you. However also, as with any new activity, the first few attempts can be clumsy and awkward maybe even discouraging. Don't be discouraged. It doesn't matter if you don't 'ace it' the first or second or third time you try. You will get another chance the next time and the time after that and the time after that. Be easy on yourself. Give yourself as many chances as it takes. Forgive yourself if it seems to be going 'wrong.' Don't judge it and when you're done with it, forget it. Nobody is keeping score. Take the Nike slogan to heart and "Just DO it!"

What You Will Need:

- 20 minutes, undisturbed

- A 'place' that is comfortable and (what you consider to be) safe and private

- Patience

- Kindness/forgiveness/love

Please email/contact me (seabelle7@gmail.com) if you have any questions regarding quieting the mind. Please visit my website - http://www.yogazoebella.ca - for more information on meditation and yoga.

Thank you. May you find peace and fulfillment.

Coleen Schnurr

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 MEST

Updated: Friday, 16 March 2012 02:23 MEST

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Mood:  a-ok

As landings go, this will be one of the trickiest ever attempted.

On August 6 Nasa’s Curiosity rover, packed inside the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, will hurtle towards the Martian surface at around 13,200mph – and has just over six minutes to slow down and make a soft landing.

What’s more, the craft has to be at just the right angle for the descent to be a success – likened by one Nasa scientist to firing a golf ball from Los Angeles to land in a hole at St Andrew’s in Scotland.

Full Story from dailymail.co.uk

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 MEST

Updated: Thursday, 15 March 2012 10:31 MEST

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Mood:  chatty

Let your better self rest assured: Dearly held values truly are sacred, and not merely cost-benefit analyses masquerading as nobel intent, concludes a new study on the neurobiology of moral decision-making. Such values are conceived differently, and occur in very different parts of the brain, than utilitarian decisions.

“Why do people do what they do?” said neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory University. “Asked if they’d kill an innocent human being, most people would say no, but there can be two very different ways of coming to that answer. You could say it would hurt their family, that it would be bad because of the consequences. Or you could take the Ten Commandments view: You just don’t do it. It’s not even a question of going beyond.”

In a study published Jan. 23 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Berns and colleagues posed a series of value-based statements to 27 women and 16 men while using an fMRI machine to map their mental activity (Left: Blood flows to different parts of the brain in utilitarian (green) and matter-of-principle (yellow) decisions. Image: Berns et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.) The statements were not necessarily religious, but intended to cover a spectrum of values ranging from frivolous (“You enjoy all colors of M&Ms”) to ostensibly inviolate (“You think it is okay to sell a child”).

After answering, test participants were asked if they’d sign a document stating the opposite of their belief in exchange for a chance at winning up to $100 in cash. If so, they could keep both the money and the document; only their consciences would know.

According to Berns, this methodology was key. The conflict between utilitarian and duty-based moral motivations is a classic philosophical theme, with historical roots in the formulations of Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, and other researchers have studied it — but none, said Berns, had combined both brain imaging and a situation where moral compromise was realistically possible.

“Hypothetical vignettes are presented to people, and they’re asked, ‘How did you arrive at a decision?’ But it’s impossible to really know in a laboratory setting,” said Berns. “Signing your name to something for a price is meaningful. It’s getting into integrity. Even at $100, most all our test subjects put some things into categories they were willing to take money for, and others they wouldn’t.”

When test subjects agreed to sell out, their brains displayed common signatures of activity in regions previously linked to calculating utility. When they refused, activity was concentrated in other parts of their brains: the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing and understanding abstract rules, and the right temporoparietal junction, which has been implicated in moral judgement.

'If it's a sacred value to you, then you can't even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.'

In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” Berns said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”

According to Berns, the implications could help people better understand the motivations of others. He’s now studying how moral equations change according to the social popularity of values, and what happens in the brain when deep-seated principles are confronted with reasoned arguments. “Can I change your mind? Lessen your conviction? Strengthen it? And how does this happen? Is this appealing to rule-based networks, or to systems of reward and loss?” Berns wondered.

Whether sacred principles offer utilitarian benefits over long periods of time — many years, perhaps many generations, and at population-wide as well as individual scales — is beyond the current study design, but Berns suspects that one of their benefits is simplicity.

“My hypothesis about the Ten Commandments is that they exist because they’re too hard to think about on a cost-benefit basis,” he said. “It’s far easier to have a rule saying, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ It simplifies decisionmaking.”

Article Source - dailygood.org

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 MEST

Updated: Wednesday, 14 March 2012 02:34 MEST

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Mood:  d'oh

The idea of cholesterol creating cardiac problems has caused obsessive cholesterol count blood testing for decades. Another outcome of this scare was obsessively avoiding fat, especially saturated fats.

The food industry responded with low and no fat foods from milk to cottage cheese and more. Processed foods promoted their low or no fat contents as though they were the healthiest foods in the freezer.

Healthy fats such as coconut oil and palm oil were spurned and replaced by very unhealthy trans-fat, processed and heated cooking oils. Relatively healthy whole butters were replaced by plastic margarines.

However, this myth of cholesterol dangers lurking in saturated fats waiting to clog your arteries and cause you to die of cardiac arrest is beginning to unravel.

Unraveling the myth of cholesterol

A meta-analysis of properly performed previous studies on heart health and saturated fats concluded there was no association between cardiac issues and saturated fats. This was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) on January 13th, 2010.

Meta-analysis is a statistical method of proving or disproving varied epidemiological studies within a set topic. The AJCN meta-analysis covered studies involving 350,000 subjects who were followed for 5 to 23 years.

The trend set by the saturated fat high cholesterol disinformation a few decades ago has resulted in many Americans eating less fat and showing lower blood cholesterol levels. Yet, heart disease rates have continued to rise along with diabetes, pre-diabetes and obesity.

Dr. William Davis explains in his article "A Headline You Will Never See: 60 Year Old Man Dies of Cholesterol" that cholesterol doesn't kill "any more than a bad paint job on your car could cause a fatal car accident."

He explains the cause of most heart attacks and coronary problems is atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries, which can build up and rupture or clog the arteries. He goes on to describe other factors that can cause plaque ruptures, including inflammatory pneumonia.

Though there can be some cholesterol in the plaque, cholesterol itself is waxy and pliable. Cholesterol is important for brain cells, nerves and other cellular structural components. Calcium deposits (calcification) in artery interiors are much worse components of plaque. It belongs in your bones and not in your arteries. Vitamin K2 helps transport calcium out of your blood and into your bones.

Dr. Davis recommends avoiding cholesterol panels for heart health concerns and opting for a measure of coronary atherosclerotic plaque.

The scam continues despite overwhelming contradictory evidence

Despite more and more published journals and doctors proving coronary heart disease (CHD) is not caused by high saturated fat diets and cholesterol, the myth persists. Many peoplewith low cholesterol have died of CHD while in their 40s, while many with high cholesterol never have CHD issues.

Several studies of heart attack cadavers have also revealed the disinformation of cholesterol dangers. Yet the common advice from cardiologists upon seeing high cholesterol is to get an angiogram,adiagnostic testwhichis expensive and not so safe. Then there are those pricey drugs meantto lower cholesterol while wreaking havoc on overall health.

Cholesterol is vital for many functions. For example, it helps convert sunlight into vitamin D3. If you're not getting enough with your food, the liver is forced to manufacture it. Low cholesterol has been linked to higher stroke risks.

Oxidized cholesterol from hydrogenated and refined polyunsaturated cooking oils and margarine can lead to complications that result in CHD. This comes not only directly from the oils themselves, but indirectly from the oxidation process those oils initiate.

These toxic oils and butter substitutes were created to replace thewholesome saturated fats that should be consumed.

Sources for this article include:

(1) http://www.sott.net

(2) http://www.opednews.com

(3) http://www.treelight.com/health/healing/Cholesterol.html

About the author:

Paul Fassa is dedicated to warning others about the current corruption of food and medicine and guiding others toward a direction for better health with no restrictions on health freedom. You can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com

Article Source - naturalnews.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 MEST

Updated: Tuesday, 13 March 2012 02:11 MEST

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Mood:  bright

The main reason meditation for healing can work for you is that it's a tool for helping you slip past the endless, day-to-day chatter your conscious mind indulges in and which gets in the way of healing energy. Once you can get into the space between your thoughts you will be able to find the pure healing energy of the Universal Consciousness.

Just getting yourself into the relaxed state where you can tap into this energy is often all you need to assist with healing on every level. It works because the universal energy is intelligent. It knows where it needs to go and what it has to do to unblock channels and rebalance your energy system.

But this isn't the whole story - meditation for healing can help in another way.

Stress And Wellbeing

Most people are aware that stress isn't at all good for your general wellbeing. If you're stressed, you block the flow of energies in your body which can lead to stagnation, imbalance and could eventually bring on physical illness and disease.

An important way that stress can affect you is in the way you breathe. If you're stressed your breathing is likely to be shallow or uneven, or it's possible you may even hold your breath for a short time, although you might not be aware you're doing it.

So if you can become aware of your breath and train yourself to breathe deeply and smoothly you'll send the right message to your body. You'll be consciously telling it to relax.

The Mind Body Connection

Meditation for healing is a simple and effective way to achieve this mind-body connection, and it doesn't entail having to sit in an uncomfortable yoga position. All you need to do is relax and focus on your breathing. Your breathing is the 'connection' between your mind and your body. Your mind controls your breathing, and your breathing determines your level of physical relaxation, so in this way you can establish a feedback loop.

Many studies have come to the conclusion that meditation for healing can, amongst other things, improve your life expectancy, retard the aging process, help boost your immune system as well as lower your blood pressure. Its benefits offer real proof that your consciousness can affect and improve your physical, mental and emotional health.

Meditation for healing, put simply, it's one of the simplest and most effective ways you can promote wellbeing in every area of your life.

Would you like to know how to heal yourself, others and animals even at a distance? For more information and a FREE ebook visit Healing-By-Energy.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 MEST

Updated: Monday, 12 March 2012 02:48 MEST

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Mood:  chatty

How the time of day can increase the risk of dying from an irregular heartbeat has been identified by researchers.

The risk of "sudden cardiac death" peaks in the morning and rises again in the evening.

A study published in the journal Nature suggests that levels of a protein which controls the heart's rhythm fluctuate through the day.

Full Story from BBC

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Sunday, 11 March 2012 01:14 CET

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Mood:  not sure

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.

But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.

Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.

Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

By Ken Murray

Article Source - dailygood.org

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Saturday, 10 March 2012 01:48 CET

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Mood:  a-ok

In light of recent news that the FDA found lead in 400 brands of lipstick, Yahoo! Shine took a look at other products containing potentially hazardous ingredients.

While the levels are much lower today then in the past, according to a 2011 report by Environmental Defense, an Ontario-based research group found that dangerous heavy metals still lurk in lip gloss, mascara, foundation, blush, eye shadow, and eyeliner.

Full Story from yahoo.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Friday, 9 March 2012 01:11 CET

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Mood:  chatty

British researchers believe that the worms, which live in ponds and lakes, could live forever after examining their ability to repeatedly regenerate.

Experts from Nottingham University managed to create a colony of more than 20,000 flatworms from one original by chopping it into pieces and observing each section grow into a new complete worm.

They believe that it could help scientists develop new methods to allow humans to stay younger for longer.

Full Story from telegraph.co.uk

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Thursday, 8 March 2012 01:17 CET

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Mood:  cheeky

Creativity, perhaps more than any other human trait, separates humans from other animals. And death, it seems at least, is the destoyer of all creativity. After all, a person obviously can't be creative if they are dead. (I like to wow people with obvious statements).

Yet, recent research suggests that death might impact creativity in a unique way.

Clay Routledge is a professor of psychology at South Dakota State. He and his colleagues have tested the role that reminding people that they will die plays in their creativity.

Full Story from psychologytoday.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Wednesday, 7 March 2012 01:04 CET

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