Health & WellnessS


Bulb

Benefits of Tai Chi for your health

Chelsea Clark
Mother Earth News Magazine
Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:07 UTC
Tai Chi
My senior year of college, a friend and I signed up for a tai chi class offered on campus. We thought it would be an entertaining hour or two every week, and it gave us a few extra course credits. But a week or two in, I realized that the classes were actually something I really loved and valued as a part of my week. I looked forward to the few hours each week where I got to calm my mind and move my body at the same time.

If you've never tried tai chi before, I highly recommend it. Not only is it an enjoyable activity, but it is also a very healthy one; tai chi is proven to help numerous conditions and benefit your general health.

Comment: Additional studies on the benefits Tai Chi:

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Top Secret

Neuroscientist shares what fasting does to your brain & why Big Pharma won't study it

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Fri, 11 Dec 2015 19:06 UTC
brain scan
Below is a TEDx talk given by Mark Mattson, the current Chief of the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging. He is also a professor of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University, and one of the foremost researchers in the area of cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying multiple neurodegenerative disorders, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

I chose to include 'Big Pharma' in the title because that's exactly what it is. There have been countless examples of the manipulation of published research at the hands of pharmaceutical companies in recent years. This is why Harvard Professor of Medicine Arnold Symour Relman told the world that the medical profession has been bought by the pharmaceutical industry. It's why Dr. Richard Horton, Editor in Chief ofThe Lancet, recently stated that much of the sceintific literature published today is simply untrue. It's why Dr. Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, said that the "pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth." And it's why John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, published an article titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" which subsequently became the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Comment: Intermittent fasting is a powerful healing modality

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Pills

'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli set to raise the price of another low-cost drug 90,000%

Will Grice
The Independent
Sat, 12 Dec 2015 17:53 UTC
martin shkreli
The man who increased the cost of an effective HIV drug by 5,500 per cent has now increased the price of another form of medicine.

Martin Shkreli has now increased the price of a medicine used to treat Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause heart failure.

Mr Shkreli's company, Turing Pharmacuticals, previously acquired the rights to the anti-HIV drug, Daraprim, before increasing the price from $13.50 to $700.

This time Mr Shkreli has bought a majority share in KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, allowing him to apply for exclusive selling rights to KaloBios' benznidazole, a common drug used to treat Chigas in South America, where it is very prevelant.

It is reported by the New York Times that benznidazole currently costs between $50 to $100 for two months worth of treatment.

However the New York Times believe that the cost could soon be similar to that of a hepatitis C drug, which costs anywhere between $60,000 and $100,000 per course of treatment.

It is estimated 300,000 in the United States have Chagas disease.

Comment: Obviously Martin Shkreli doesn't care about the people suffering from diseases which need medications in order to survive. He's solely motivated by the hunt for profits and only in a country like the US where profits are more important than people's lives could such a scheme be considered 'good business.'

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Pills

The troubling case of antibiotic resistance and infectious disease

Eldon Dahl
Prevent Disease
Fri, 11 Dec 2015 17:10 UTC
antibiotics
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), has stated that antibiotic resistance is becoming so critically high that it could signal "the end of modern medicine as we know it."

A new gene, called mcr-1, has been discovered in pigs and people in China. This gene is resistant to the "last resort class" of antibiotics.

Alexander Fleming warned of this when he brought the world penicillin. He stated that misuse of antibiotics (incomplete or inappropriate treatment) would encourage bacteria to mutate into resistant forms.

Currently, antibiotic abuse is found in everything from meat, poultry and farmed seafood, and given out like candy by health professionals. Society has become dependent on what science will deliver to fight the new strains of mutating viruses, everything from penicillin to new antibiotic strains; however, they are not working because we have become resistant due to overuse. To offset the process vaccines have been implemented and heralded as the saviors but this is too soon to make that blanket evaluation.

Comment: Nature has provided us with non-pharmaceutical antibiotics which have proven useful in a number of infectious diseases: Herbs and foods that kill superbugs

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Info

Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One is fluid, the other is frozen


Alliance for Natural Health
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 17:22 UTC
Big food vs big medicine
As consumers demand safer and more natural foods, the market is starting to comply. So why doesn't Big Medicine do the same?

Consumers, according to the New York Times, have been leaving Big Food in droves, and are increasingly buying organic (not to mention free-range, cage-free, grass-fed, and/or locally sourced) foods. After years of denial, some in the food industry have finally decided to actually listen to consumers:
General Mills will drop all artificial colors and flavors from its cereals. Perdue, Tyson and Foster Farm have begun to limit the use of antibiotics in their chicken. Kraft declared it was dropping artificial dyes from its macaroni and cheese. Hershey's will begin to move away from ingredients such as the emulsifier polyglycerol polyricinoleate to "simple and easy-to-understand ingredients" like "fresh milk from local farms, roasted California almonds, cocoa beans and sugar"....Brands such as Amy's Kitchen, with its organic products, and Kind bars are taking some of the space on shelves once consumed by Nestlé's Lean Cuisine and Mars.
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Stop

Americans refusing ineffective flu vaccine this year

Jefferey Jaxen
Health Impact News
Sat, 12 Dec 2015 16:06 UTC
flu vaccine
2015-2016 Flu Shot Reporting as only 18% Effective in Adults, 15% in Children

This years 2015-2016 flu shots in the United States are showing 18 percent effectiveness in adults and 15 percent effectiveness in children according to local news reports popping up around the country. Local news outlets in Michigan, Georgia, California, and other states have decided to run the headline with this information yet, at the time of this writing, no national mainstream news appear to be touching these figures.

Although continually touted by mainstream outlets as "the single best way to prevent against the flu," this is the second year in a row the flu shot's effectiveness in the U.S. has been under 25 percent. Last January, USA Today ran the headline "Flu Shot Only 23 Percent Effective This Season." These dismal effectiveness numbers in the U.S. would have been welcomed by "officials" at the Canadian Centre of Disease Control who reported during last years flu season that their flu shots offered zero protection.

Comment: Vaccines and flu shots are good for big pharma, not us!

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Cheese

New research links milk and dairy consumption to Parkinson's disease

Alex Pietrowski
Waking Times
Fri, 11 Dec 2015 16:36 UTC
milk


Despite the fact that one can get their daily recommendation of calcium, potassium, and protein from fruits and vegetables, the dairy industry has spent billions of dollars to convince consumers otherwise.
Time magazine just published the a report on the results of a medical study looking at the factors that contribute to Parkinson's disease, a slowly progressing neurodegenerative disease that is physically and mentally crippling for those who suffer from it.

Looking specifically at the connection between the consumption of dairy products and the risk of contracting Parkinson's disease, the new research shows a causal link between the consumption of milk and dairy products and a decrease in density of the neurons in the areas of the brain typically affected by Parkinson's disease.

The study looked at data from a research project conducted in Hawaii in the 1980's to determine that milk contaminated with the no longer used agricultural insecticide, heptachlor epoxide, had somehow carried the toxic compound into the patient's brains where it had accumulated.
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Syringe

What you need to consider when it comes to mandatory vaccinations

Andy Whiteley
Wake Up World
Thu, 10 Dec 2015 21:10 UTC
vaccination
In June this year Bill SB277 was controversially signed into Californian State law, which legislates that all school-age children in California are subjected to mandatory vaccinations according to the State's vaccine schedule. Its passing into law was seen as a major loss in the fight for freedom of choice and parental rights by both human rights groups and the anti-vaccination lobby.

Going a step further, legislators in Australia have recently passed laws that require both children and young adults to be vaccinated in order to receive family tax benefits payments. The newly passed "No Jab, No Pay" laws (see: Social Services Legislation Amendment) will commence as of January 2016 — at the same time that mandatory vaccination laws also in California take effect.
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Music

Singing benefits cognitive skills and alleviates depression in dementia patients


Natural Blaze
Fri, 11 Dec 2015 00:00 UTC
singers, singing
Researchers led by Dr. Teppo Särkämö at University of Helsinki, Finland have revealed that caregiver-implemented musical leisure activities, particularly singing, are cognitively and emotionally beneficial especially in the early stages of dementia. The findings could help improve dementia care and better target the use of music in different stages of dementia. The research was published today in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Initially, the researchers recruited 89 dyads (groups of two) of persons with mild to moderate dementia and their caregivers to a single-blind randomized controlled trial in which they received a 10-week music coaching intervention involving either regular singing or listening to familiar songs or standard care. Previously, the results from a 9-month longitudinal follow-up with neuropsychological tests and mood questionnaires showed that the musical activities were able to enhance various cognitive skills, such as working memory, executive functions, and orientation, and alleviate depression compared to standard care.

Comment: Reviews of 400 published scientific papers have proven the old adage that "music is medicine." The neurochemical benefits of music can improve the body's immune system, reduce anxiety levels and help regulate mood in ways that drugs have difficulty competing. Research has also shown that group singing improves cognitive functions and increases social bonding as it creates shared emotional experiences.

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Attention

WHO report: The world's most polluted city is? Not Beijing but Delhi.

Doyle Rice
USA Today
Mon, 07 Dec 2015 21:03 UTC
Delhi pollution
© Harish Tyagi/European Pressphoto AgencyAn aerial view of the Connaught Place area of New Delhi, India, Dec. 8, 2015.
As Beijing again makes worldwide news for its hideously smog-choked skies, a look at a list of some of the planet's most polluted cities finds that the Chinese capital isn't even in the top 20 for smog.

While certainly wretched by American standards, Beijing's average air pollution level is 53, on a scale from 26 to 208. (The numbers reflect the amount of the smog-causing microscopic particles in the air.)

Many of the world's most polluted cities are in India, with Delhi "leading" the pack with a level of 153. The report, which was prepared in 2014 by the World Health Organization, looked at outdoor air pollution in nearly 1,600 cities in 91 countries.

By way of comparison, Los Angeles was at 20 and New York City at 14. The problem in Beijing is that while its overall average may not be catastrophic, when the smog gets bad it can be really dreadful, as evidenced by the current air quality reading of 200.

The great majority of cities worldwide exceed WHO's air quality guidelines.

Comment: See also:

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