When I talk about medicine and mental health to large audiences, I often start with the following imagery and facts: think of a woman you know who is radiantly healthy. I bet your intuition tells you she sleeps and eats well, finds purpose in her life, is active and fit, and finds time to relax and enjoy the company of others. I doubt you envision her waking up to prescription bottles, buoying her way through the day with caffeine and sugar, feeling anxious and isolated, and drinking herself to sleep at night. All of us have an intuitive sense of what health is, but many of us have lost the road map to optimal health, especially the kind of health that springs forth when we simply clear a path for it. The fact that one in four American women in the prime of their life is dispensed medication for a mental health condition represents a national crisis.

Humans have used mind-altering substances to try to dull and deaden pain, misery, sorrow, and suffering since time immemorial, but only in the last few decades have people been persuaded that depression is a disease and that chemical antidepressants are the remedy. This is far from the truth. Many of my patients have been to multiple doctors, bumping up against the hard ceiling of what conventional medicine has to offer. Some have even tried integrative medicine, which aims to combine both traditional medicine (i.e., prescriptions) with alternative treatments (e.g., acupuncture). After all, they are told that there are great natural complements to all the wonders pharmaceutical products have to offer. But the reason they can't find a solution is because nobody has asked why. Why are they unwell? Why are their bodies creating symptoms that manifest as depression? Why didn't they stop to ask this important and obvious question the first time they experienced a flat mood, anxiety, insomnia, and chronic exhaustion?

Natural food colors are super important to consumers when shopping for fresh food and quality food, so the richest companies and corporations in America create illusions to steal your hard-earned money and convince you to purchase aging, cheaper food at "quality pricing." You've heard of Kellogg's and McDonald's right? These two companies are constantly trying to win over customers with their latest "health claims" - consumers who realize most of what these Big Food giants manufacture and sell is processed, genetically modified, and causes health decay.

The latest claim these junk-science giants propagate is that they will purge artificial coloring from their sales tricks, thus admitting to fraud and false advertising in the process. Did you know every burger at McDonald's was artificially colored up until a few months ago? Yep. You probably also know that most kid's cereals are jacked up with artificial coloring from petrochemicals, but we won't bore you with all that old news. Let's get to the fake, juicy stuff you probably don't know about.

How it all began

September 2014 was a time in my life when I learned one of life's hardest lessons of my life. This lesson came with consequences that I continue to live with even to this very day. I woke up one fall morning with a horrendous sore throat plaguing me. I quickly called my physician to setup an appointment to rule out strep throat, which I typically caught a few times a year. The test was gratefully negative but the Doctor decided it was tonsillitis and required a prescription for Amoxicillin. Oh - If I only knew then what I know now, I would have done things so differently.

Within three days of beginning on those antibiotics, my life changed forever. Antibiotics changed my life? Yes, they did! We live in a society where we expect easy fast solutions to just about everything. A sore throat that likely only required a few days of rest and maybe the addition of some soup, popsicles, and Advil was instead treated with Dexamethasone and Amoxicillin. My stomach began to ache on day three of the 10-day course. By day five I could no longer keep food in, within seconds of eating, the food and it's nutrition was lost down the drain. As day seven rolled around I stopped taking the prescription, I could not take it anymore! Now everything should have gotten better right? Not even close!

Round One

I downed Imodium (anti-diarrhea medication) as if it were candy, taking the maximum allowed dosage for weeks, hoping my body would return to normal. Leaving the house was no longer an option, a five-minute trip to town could end in embarrassment and anguish. After a month of dealing with the extreme diarrhea it was time to call in the cavalry. It took only one phone call to the doctor to prompt a bit of panic. I left a message for the doctor who quickly returned my call instructing me to do a fecal sample that day. She had a bit of urgency in her voice, which scared me a little. She stated the results would be back within forty-eight hours. The sample was taken to the hospital on Friday at four and I received a call Saturday at nine in the morning. The nice doctor on the other end explained she was the on-call emergency doctor for the weekend and she needed me to listen very well. That I had contracted C-diff (Clostridium difficile) and was terribly infectious.....what?I had never heard of C-diff up until this point. She called in some medications and nicely told me to stay home and follow up with my family doctor Monday morning. Ok let me get this right, an illness brought on by antibiotics required more antibiotics?

Today on the Health and Wellness Show, we welcome back to the show Doctors of acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine Linnéa Snyder (L.Ac. MSTCM) and James Lovinsky (L.Ac. MSTCM).

Linnéa was first drawn to acupuncture after receiving it as a teenager and noticing its widespread effects. Most notably, she loves the way it balances one's nervous-system and can clear emotional build-up without the necessity of attaching or sharing about the feelings or pain. Linnéa is interested in women's health, psycho-emotional disorders and stress induced illnesses. James came upon acupuncture during a very stressful period in his life. After trying several modalities to treat his own stress-induced health concerns, he settled on acupuncture. Upon changing his career and beginning acupuncture school he realized that Chinese medicine offered many treatments that could give patients an alternative to drugs and surgery. James is interested in pain management, digestive disorders and psycho-emotional health.

Linnéa and James practice at their clinic, Opus Total Health, in West Greenwich, RI (Opus Total Health - Its your life... live it in health!). They treat patients from all walks of life with acupuncture, bodywork, Chinese herbal medicine and diet and nutrition therapy.

Join us for a fascinating discussion about acupuncture, Chinese medicine and somatic therapy. And stayed tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic will be human history from a cat's perspective.

Running Time: 01:23:25

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Pack your bags ladies, we're relocating into nature! Our prayers for finding the fountain of youth have been answered! Ok, well maybe not entirely the fountain of youth, BUT, hear me out. Recent studies have confirmed that women who surround themselves in or live within nature, live longer! Research has shown that stress reduction, as well as an increase in both physical and social activity, were affected by natural environments. The intention of the study conducted was to get a better understanding of the relationship between "residential greenness and mortality". Its findings became quite eye-opening for the livelihood of women.

The study composed on women over a span of 8 years from 2000-2008 was conducted on 108,630 women. During this time, 8,604 of these women passed away during the study. Considerations of age, race, smoking, and socioeconomic status played a role within this study. However, it was found that in the greenest of surroundings to a women's home there was an overall 12 percent lower mortality rate versus those living in areas with less vegetation. The strongest associations came to deaths related to cancerous andrespiratory illnesses. The women who lived in higher vegetated areas incurred a 34 percent lower rate of deaths related to respiratory issues, and a 13 perfect lower rate of deaths due to cancer.

One of the world's biggest cruise ships, Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas, is returning to a Florida port a day early and giving passengers full refunds of their fare after 277 guests and crew members were hit with an outbreak of norovirus as it sailed to Jamaica.

Cruise line spokesman Owen Torres told The Associated Press, "We think the right thing to do is get everyone home early rather than have guests worry about their health."

He says the ship will return to Port Canaveral on Saturday. It sailed from there Sunday on a seven-day Caribbean cruise.

Passengers took to social media on Wednesday, tweeting they were forced to stay onboard after docking in Falmouth, Jamaica, for what was supposed to be a day of excursions.

Torres said returning a day early gives the cruise line "more time to completely clean and sanitize the ship" before it sails again.

A Jan. 6, 2018 news report produced by investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson for Sinclair Broadcast Group revealed that retired congressmen Dan Burton (R-IN) and Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and current Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) were pressured by colleagues or threatened by PhRMA lobbyists to back away from examining vaccine safety issues, including the reported link between vaccines and autism.¹ The report also revealed that, in 2007, federal government officials suppressed and then misrepresented the expert opinion of pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman that vaccines can cause autism during U.S. Federal Court of Claims hearings evaluating vaccine-related autism claims filed in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP).²

Never forget that this is a 'two way street' in that those countries who control the satellites basically will incredibly control all people on Earth.

The global deployment of the fifth-generation wireless network,(5G) constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is nothing less than a crime under international law.

Yet the subject of the the enormous dangers of the imminent and rapid deployment of 5G technology was not mentioned when world leaders gathered earlier this month in Poland for the UN 'Earth' conference.

An inconvenient truth perhaps that our leaders could argue was not part of the overall subject in Poland of the well being of the Earth and all its inhabitants. Give me a break.

Today we investigate one of the biggest medical controversies of our time: vaccines. There's little dispute about this much-- vaccines save many lives, and rarely, they injure or kill. A special federal vaccine court has paid out billions for injuries from brain damage to death. But not for the form of brain injury we call autism. Now-we have remarkable new information: a respected pro-vaccine medical expert used by the federal government to debunk the vaccine-autism link, says vaccines can cause autism after all. He claims he told that to government officials long ago, but they kept it secret.

Yates Hazlehurst was born February 11, 2000. Everything was normal, according to his medical records, until he suffered a severe reaction to vaccinations. Rolf Hazlehurst is Yates' dad.

Rolf Hazlehurst: And at first, I didn't believe it. I did not think that, I did not believe that vaccines could cause autism. I didn't believe it.

But there's a hard reality for Yates. The trademark brain disease, pain and inability to communicate that's common with severe autism.

In 2007, Yates' father sued over his son's injuries in the little known Federal Vaccine court. It was one of more than 5000 vaccine autism claims.

Research out of University Minnesota Medical School and published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight uncovers what causes diastolic heart failure and how it can be treated.

In the article, "Magnesium supplementation improves diabetic mitochondrial and cardiac diastolic function," author Samuel Dudley, MD, Ph.D., Academic Chief of Cardiology at the University of Minnesota Medical School and his fellow researchers found that magnesium can be used to treat diastolic heart failure.

"We've found that cardiac mitochondrial oxidative stress can cause diastolic dysfunction. Since magnesium is an essential element for mitochondrial function, we decided to try the supplement as a treatment," explained Dudley. "It eliminated the poor heart relaxation that causes diastolic heart failure."