Creative art pursuits provide older adults with multiple benefits, not the least of which is enhanced cognitive function.

Throughout history, artists have known that art provides benefits for both the creator and viewer. Current studies in the fields of art therapy, music therapy, and other creative modalities confirm that art can affect individuals in positive ways by inducing both psychological and physiological healing. We know that, in general, exercising our creative selves enhances quality of life and nurtures overall well-being. We all are creative - not just a select few.

Less well known is the effectiveness of incorporating expressive arts into programs for older adults and patients who are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other chronic degenerative diseases. Recent clinical research validates what some professionals and others who work with older adults have known for years - that making art is an essential, vital component of activities that offer a wide range of health benefits. Several studies show that art can reduce the depression and anxiety that are often symptomatic of chronic diseases. Other research demonstrates that the imagination and creativity of older adults can flourish in later life, helping them to realize unique, unlived potentials, even when suffering from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.

Erik Erickson's eighth and last stage of psychological development culminates in an integration of the individual's past, present, and future to confront the conflict between integrity and despair. The result can be either despair or wisdom. When older adults pursue activities that are based in meaning, purpose, and honesty, they can attain the wisdom and integrity about which Erickson writes rather than experiencing longing and despair. Therapeutic art experiences can supply meaning and purpose to the lives of older adults in supportive, nonthreatening ways.

It's illegal for children to vote. It's illegal for children to choose to drink alcohol. It's illegal for children to drive. It's illegal for children to give consent for medical procedures. Yet, New York is planning to let children give consent for vaccinations, a potentially life-changing or destroying procedure, without parental consent?

On Monday, May 6, a new bill is to be brought to the New York State Assembly floor which will allow licensed physicians to administer preventative medical care for sexually transmitted diseases, including vaccines to minors without their parent's permission.

This will include the vaccinations for hepatitis B and HPV.

The reasoning behind the bill is that section 2305 of the public health law currently permits a licensed physician or a staff physician to diagnose and treat a person under the age of 21 infected or exposed to a sexually transmissible disease without the consent or knowledge of the parents or guardians.

The bill states that the current law does not allow young people the same access to care as adults to prevent sexually transmissible diseases.

The bill states:

Teens should not be limited to access to care on a confidential basis after the fact, or after infection or contraction of a sexually transmissible disease. Teens should have access to confidential care before infection or contracting the sexually transmissible disease, to prevent disease or life-threatening illness such as cervical cancer and liver cancer.^[1]

When a bill of this nature becomes law, minors can be vaccinated without their parent's permission, and vaccines for sexually transmitted diseases could also be able to be given to newborns without parental consent.

NIH study documents gender variations in brain activity

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have uncovered firm evidence for what many mothers have long suspected: women's brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant.

Researchers asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men's brains remained in the resting state.

If we didn't have enough to worry about in the grocery aisles, with GMOs, toxic additives, and pesticide-soaked foods, we can now add a new concern: nanoparticles.

What exactly is a nanoparticle? As You Sow, a non-profit consumer advocacy group, explains:

Nanomaterials are often heralded as having the potential to revolutionize the food industry - from enabling the production of creamy liquids that contain no fat, to enhancing flavors,improving supplement delivery, providing brighter colors, keeping food fresh longer, or indicating when it spoils. It is reported that nanotechnology is already used in food and food related products, but due to lack of transparency about the issue, concrete information has been difficult to obtain.

Because of their small size, nanoparticles are able to go places in the body that larger particles cannot. Nanoparticles in food or food packaging can gain access via ingestion, inhalation,or skin penetration. When ingested, the nano-sized particles facilitate uptake into cells and can allow them to pass into the blood and lymph where they circulate through the body and reach potentially sensitive target sites such as bone marrow, lymph nodes, the spleen, the brain, the liver, and the heart. Nanoparticles penetrating the skin can distribute through the body via lymphatic channels. Inhaled nano TiO2 has been found to act like asbestos and silicone in that it accumulates in the lung and causes inflammation and can impact DNA proteins and cell membranes. (download the entire report on nanoparticles HERE)

So, much like GMOs, nanoparticle technology was not properly tested before it entered our food supply.

There are several reasons why the medical cartel is too big to fail: the enormous amount of money at stake; its aim to control populations.

In this article, I want to examine a related reason.

Suppose it was discovered that thousands of bridges around the US were in imminent danger of collapsing? Not because maintenance and repair were lacking, not because the materials used to build them were cheap and shoddy. But because the original designs were inadequate and broke basic rules of engineering.

Suppose five or six major manufacturers built their automobiles so the vast majority of power derived from the engines was transferred to one wheel?

Suppose the US Dept. of Agriculture recommended that all farmers spray their crops with heavy chlorine instead of water?

In other words, the science itself is fraudulent.

Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you're partaking of an ancient relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides created by Shell and Bayer and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies like Monsanto.

But never worry, those real life pollinators - the birds and the bees, as they say - may soon be irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.

When you order sushi at your favorite restaurant or pick up a pound of coffee from your local supermarket, you assume you're getting the red snapper or Columbian beans as stated on the menu or label.

But not so fast. A growing number of cases of "food fraud" are occurring in the United States, such that you may not be able to tell what you're really eating just by looking at the label.

Worse still, most of these cases are not highly publicized incidents like the recent scandal of UK supermarkets selling "beef" burgers that actually contained horse and pig meat. Instead, they're ongoing cases of blatant misrepresentation among some incredibly common foods.

Everybody feels stress and knows it intimately, but very few of us think about what stress actually is.

Stress is a thought. That's it. No more, no less. If that's true, then we have complete control over stress, because it's not something that happens to us but something that happens in us.

The dictionary definition of stress is, "bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium." It is your thoughts out of balance.

The medical definition of stress is, "the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego." It could be a tiger chasing you or your belief that your spouse is mad at you (even if he or she is not). Whether it is real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body.

A cascade of adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones floods your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain's memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally wreaking havoc on your body.

Senior scientists have criticised the "appalling irresponsibility" of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

"They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever," Lord May told The Independent.

"The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It's appallingly irresponsible," he said.

The controversial study into viral mixing was carried out by a team led by Professor Hualan Chen, director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.

Professor Chen and her colleagues deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal but not easily transmitted between people, with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.

Do Americans have the right to know what's in our food? Do we have the right to choose to NOT eat Genetically Modified (GMO) food? The next round in the years-long battle has begun, as Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressman Pete DeFazio (D-OR) introduce the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act (read the Senate bill here, House bill here)

The good news:

• This is a bi-partisan bill with a bunch of co-sponsors (listed at the end of this article).
• Labeling has huge public support.

The bad news:

• Big agriculture, and corporate behemoth Monsanto in particular, HATE the idea of labeling. They claim their food is perfectly safe... so we should just shut up and buy it.
• These guys just spent $46 million to kill a ballot measure in California, Prop 37... so you can bet they're going to be spending big bucks to buy this bill a slow and quiet death.
• Monsanto has done a good job of packing Washington with their lobbyists (as well as putting many of their former employees into the very jobs that are supposed to regulate GMO food - see "Monsanto Employees in the Halls of Government Part 1" and "... Part 2".)