Inspired

Is XMRV the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

Here's another virus-focused article from the NYTimes that discusses the link between a retrovirus named "XMRV" and symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), once condescendingly referred to as "yuppie flu."

Symptoms of CFS include muscle and joint pain, headache, fatigue not relieved by rest, mild fever, and other symptoms. It seems to most often affect women ages 30-50.

Retroviruses are also associated with diseases such as HIV and leukemia.

Viruses got you down? Don't go for a flu shot!

I've been slacking off on the blogosphere. I've just been so darn busy figuring how to get from point A to point B lately. See, I'm moving to Minneapolis soon, where the snow is deep and the people are deeper. I wonder if the viruses are hardier?

The one I'm now hosting that seems to be snacking on my brain. Not that I'd ever get or recommend the flu shot...check out this great article from The Atlantic magazine. Though they quote false facts concerning how useful vaccines have been, you'll think three times before considering it...

Stress and Creativity: from bummed-out to bliss

I've often described the moment of getting lost in the creative process as one of the most healing kinds of activities. It is healing in the sense that modern ailments largely originate from our overwhelming levels of stress.

Stress can be a positive force, inspiring us to take action, to make changes, to let go and move forward. Unfortunately, many of us instead try to dissociate and avoid the pain of change with drugs, alcohol, food, and shopping. All of these activities are strongly condoned in our "culture of excess," but I'd like to suggest another way to deal with pain and confusion, overwhelm and negativity.

First, tidy up your home, office, bedroom. (Yes, mom was right...) A dirty, chaotic environment drains your energy and focus. If you don't have time do do all of it, clean and organize the room you spend the most time in.

Second, hit the off button and back away from the computer. Take out your musical instrument, art supplies, CDs, sewing machine, costumes, etc and spread out your stuff.

Put on some favorite music. Get up and move to it for at least 20 minutes to warm up your engine. Pretend you are on stage if that feels good - nobody's watching.

Now go over to your costumes/ art supplies /instrument/ writing journal. Give yourself permission to make "bad art" for the next one to three hours. If it sounds right, focus on your conflicted relationship, situation, or health issue and set an intention to "make a discovery."

Let feelings come up and inform your creative expression. Get it out in the open.
Then let me know what kind of magic you find...

Uniqueness as a definition of health

In Homeopathy, a person's uniqueness is everything.

Compared with conventional medicine in which uniqueness is completely ignored, Homeopathy is all about how you are different from everyone else. You know in an MD's office, a diabetic will get insulin, anyone with depression will get Effexor or Prozac or Wellbutrin, and every woman with a hormonal complaint will be given birth control pills. You are treated as a statistic that should fit into a chart. In this same way, bad reactions to drugs are considered anomalies that don't fit into the bell graph.

In the paradigm of Homeopathy, you are considered to be an original, one-of-a-kind-person that comes with your own set of symptoms, strengths, and weaknesses. Not only that, but the particular way in which you express a symptom (i.e. headache, menstrual cramps, chest pain) is also reflected in the "totality" of your mental and emotional way of being in the world. We could say that symptoms are a strategy for expressing ourselves. A good homeopath sees how everything about you resonates with a specific pattern (or color, or sound, if you want to get metaphorical.)

We could call the conscious part of you, your personality. The unconscious parts of you are attitudes and beliefs that motivate your behaviors and choices, big and small. All of us at one time or another, usually before the age of 5, decided who we are and what's possible for us, and we have been living our lives as if we are that. It's often the unconscious that runs the show called "life," where we are the stars of our own daytime soaps. This is the how a Homeopath diagnoses where your uniqueness has gotten "stuck" on one level or another - i.e. how you're not getting to fully "be" you.

I believe we are all here on this planet to learn how to express our uniqueness at the highest level, and that Homeopathic treatment is key to unlocking our own personal evolution. Relationships, family dynamics, work, and health status are all impacted by how we choose to either be ourselves, or not. Everything we attract into our lives is another piece of the puzzle to nudge us into unfolding, blossoming, manifesting, and expressing. The events and people that surround us are in some way resonating with who we are, who we want to be, or even who our parents wanted us to be. Since we can only evolve as much as we are fully expressed, the more evolved we are individually, the more the whole world becomes more perfectly expressed. When we are fully expressed we experience freedom, satisfaction, and joy - we are fully alive.

Fecundity

a. the intellectual productivity of a creative imagination
b. fertility: the state of being fertile; capable of producing offspring
c. fruitfulness: the quality of something that causes or assists healthy growth

Why socialized medicine? Sicko says it all.

Like in his other movies, Michael Moore makes you laugh, cry, cringe, and growl in his healthcare documentary. And as usual, many comparisons are made between Canada and the U.S. Geez, they have free healthcare, live longer lives, AND they don't have guns. How DO they do it??? Here are some facts I borrowed from his website:

(Those Canadians are so radical ~ I'm always impressed by my colleagues in B.C. who tell me Naturopathic and Homeopathic medicine are household terms, rather than mysterious symbols of "unscientific experimentation.")

Canada spends only $3,165 per capita on health care, compared to over $7,000 per capita in the United States.
Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services

The life expectancy in Canada is three years longer than in the United States.
Source: World Health Organization

The infant mortality rate in Canada is 5.0 per thousand, compared with 7.0 per thousand in the United States.
Source: World Health Organization

24 percent of Americans did not seek medical care because of cost, compared to 5 percent in Canada.
Source: 'Inequities In Health Care: A Five-Country Survey,' Health Affairs.

There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, compared with none in Canada.
Source: Centers for Disease Control

The median waiting time in Canada is only three weeks for diagnostic tests and only four weeks for specialist visits and non-emergency surgery.
Source: Statistics Canada

70 to 80 percent of Canadians feel their wait times are acceptable.
Source: Statistics Canada

Homeopathy explained

History
Homeopathy was developed by a German MD by the name of Samuel Hahnemann. Dr. Hahnemann's work was mainly as a medical translator and chemist. Inspired by the idea "like cures like," he began experimentation with toxic substances to see how he could make medicine out of them without killing people. In Hahnemann's day it was popular to treat syphilis, for example, with mercury. What he discovered is that by diluting and shaking repeatedly (potentizing) various substances (some toxic), healing was possible with previously unseen results of his time.

Safety
Currently about 120,000 people die every year from physician error or negligence, including misuse or incorrect pharmaceutical prescriptions. In the last 200+ years since homeopathy was developed, there have been zero deaths as a result of having taken a homeopathic medicine. In fact, circa the 1918 Influenza pandemic (symptoms were similar to Ebola) approximately 80% of people treated with conventional medicine died, while > 60% of people treated with homeopathy survived. Probably not placebo affect.

Worldwide Practice Today
Today, more than 250,000 physicians are practicing homeopathy in India alone, and 10 million people there are being treated with it. Millions in South American and Italy, Spain, England, and Germany also regularly use homeopathy. In fact, in the U.S., one out of 6 physicians (MDs) at the turn of the century practiced homeopathy. Infants and animals, along with skeptical adults, have been successfully treated for everything from boo-boos to flus to endocrine disorders to autoimmune disease. Even cancer, though it wouldn't be legal in the western world. Again, doubtful that 10 million people alone in India are getting well on placebo alone. Unless Indian people have some kind of special susceptibility to placebo. In the U.S. both MDs and alternative healthcare providers such as NDs as well as Psychotherapists practice Homeopathy.

How It Works
That is the $ 60k question that nobody can answer to this day. It is theorized that in the making of homeopathic medicines, or "remedies," the energy or wavelength of that substance is imprinted upon the water used in making the medicine. Sounds rather bizarre and far-fetched, except that research has shown that water contains memory. The bottom line is that we don't know how it works. Then again, neither do we know how antidepressants work. Don't believe me? Check out this link to Wellbutrin. When a homeopathic medicine is incorrect, nothing happens because it isn't "resonating" with what needs to be cured in you. That's when the homeopath needs to give a different medicine that more closely resonates with your dis-ease.

What Homeopathy Treats
Homeopathy can treat things like bruising, allergies, asthma, acne, hormonal imbalances such as those in menopause or menarche, PMS, uterine fibroids, cysts, hemorrhoids, sexual dysfunction, neurological diseases, assist healing from surgery, and depression and anxiety. But what's different about homeopathy is that it isn't just stopping the symptoms of your illness. It takes into consideration everything that makes you tick: your past history, upbringing, emotional patterns, and your beliefs. The prescription encompasses how your life experiences and your genetics have shaped you up to this point in time. And it actually does, and has, cured illnesses, both simple and complex.

The Job of a Homeopath
What a homeopath needs to do is understand YOU, as a person, and to differentiate your ILLNESS from WHAT'S WELL WITH YOU. A homeopath's job is to perceive how the totality of your symptoms, some of which may be emotional, i.e. mood swings, or mental, i.e. nightmares, fit with everything else that is causing pain in your body. The homeopath needs to recognize patterns or themes; to see, in techie terms, the core of your operating system. That requires a lengthy consultation with you that can last up to 2 hours, and then researching to find the exact medicine that addresses the core of who your are. Then you follow up to report changes over a period of months and years, with less frequency as your issues resolve.

What Treatment is Like
It's not that subtle. When clients get the right remedy, they know it. Their PMS, headaches, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, depression, (fill in the blank) starts to resolve. After receiving the right remedy, every month the symptoms lessen. The catch is that it's not an instantaneous fix. What's happening is that your body's own vital force, called chi, prana, Life Force, or energy, depending on what culture you identify with, is reorganizing itself. Your vital force goes to whatever is the most important system, such as your brain, lungs, heart, or liver, and starts to support that system's functioning at a higher level. What that looks like to you is less headache, less intense herpes outbreaks, less depression, more happiness, less painful joints, better digestion, higher energy, deeper sleep, etc. Symptoms that are less life-threatening, such as skin eruptions or dandruff, take longer to resolve.

The Potential of Homeopathy
Treatment can resolve many different types of physical, mental, and emotional problems. However, it does require some committment from the patient/ client as well as the prescriber. The skill and experience of the prescriber is important, though the relationship of trust that is established as with any practitioner is probably moreso. I have seen clients resolve not just physical illnesses, but also be able to reduce or eliminate medications, make huge strides in psychotherapy, improve relationships with family and partners, let go of past traumas, increase freedom of movement and vitality, further their personal expression, even clarify their life's purpose. Homeopathy is not psychotherapy nor reiki; it is not acupuncture, herbal medicine, or psychic healing, and it is not placebo. It is the medicine of the future, and it is here to stay.

Click here for a wonderful FAQ about homeopathy from Hahnemann Labs.

What does dis ease really come from?

Science is finally catching up with alternative medicine, once considered "woo-woo," showing us just how powerful the mind portion of mind-body medicine IS. Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states 85 PERCENT of all diseases have an emotional element? Do you know that Bruce Lipton PhD has promoted a new theory explaining the science behind the mind-body, think-it-manifest-it practice? Check out his ideas about how we can change our genetic expression through changing our belief system. Maybe some day we'll understand how homeopathic medicines work to help shift genetic expression by altering our self-concepts, expanding our awareness, and promoting evolution!

5 Worst Foods You Could Possibly Eat

I lifted this directly from Dr. Mercola. Read if you want to know why eating fries increases your risk for cancer, why soda will make you fat and depressed, and what seafood is really risky. If you want to know how to clean it all up, or when you're ready to detox from the holidays, go here.

Brave Doc Brings Secrets into the Light

Looks like there are a few good women docs out there willing to Risk It All so that many women can benefit. If you, or anyone you know has had an ABORTION, this book looks like a good one to read. The subject has long been controvertial but how few conversations ever center on the experience, rather than the "right?"