by Eva van Loon
Three recent notes convince me—again—that our health and education are as much in collapse as economics and politics.*
That old song runs through my head: “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho...and the walls come a’tumblin’ down”, about the biblical hero whose trumpets, as his men march around the city, bring down the enemy’s walls. This motif, of a powerful voice able to shatter glass and otherwise unbreakable barriers, persists in our films and stories (The Little Mermaid, The Fifth Element, Shrek, Avatar), a recognition of the power of invisible but nevertheless real frequencies.
First, now that I’m back in a school environment, I notice kids aren’t sleeping well. None of the teens I work with gets a good night’s sleep—ever: they claim to have been busy with electronic gewgaws all night, or kept awake by noise. They yawn, stretch, droop—their sleep debt must be enormous. I am re-training exhausted, frustrated, off-schedule brains. My programs still work, but would work so much better if these kids would just GO TO BED ON TIME!
I notice their food and drink. What happened to water fountains? The kids don’t even know the location of the nearest one. They bring juice boxes, which apparently grow on trees, plus bread, pastry, soda, maybe processed cheese or meat and almost certainly a packaged sweet. Or maybe the sweetened yogurt that was meant to be the breakfast they couldn’t make time for.
Remembering the celery stalks, apples, and home-made sandwiches of my waxed-paper lunches so many years ago, I struggle to avoid starting the next sentence with, “In my day....”. Read more »
by Eva van Loon
The acquisition of wisdom is seldom much fun. The happiness part comes later, once the pain subsides.
Take me, the woman stepping around town now with a smile wrapped twice around my face, ending with a knot behind my ear. I’m idiotically happy. Why? Because I’m still alive. Because surgery saved me for another day. Because I’m Canadian, which means I partake in what Americans call, in dread and loathing, “socialised medicine”. Because, if I still lived in the US, I’d be slowly dying now, too poor to save my life even if I knew how sick I was.
In theory, of course, I knew that our medical system, although not the world’s best compared to, say, that of France, is a far more harmonious interplay of needs and expertise than Americans’ addiction to what they think is “free enterprise” for doctors, researchers, and medical entrepreneurs, and “free choice” for patients—hah! I watch Michael Moore like anybody else.
In reality, there’s nothing like triple-whammy surgery, six days in the hospital, and six weeks of baby-steps recovery to bring home the truth: medicine is not politics, dear American friends—it’s a resource basic to life. In a world as polluted and harried as ours, every one of us is going to need a medical miracle sooner or later. Mine was sooner.
It may come as a surprise to read here an exhortation to anyone over fifty, or fat, dragged out, and hollow-eyed as I was, to visit a doctor and ask for the new colon-cancer screening. This experience has taught me—again—that health and harmony are synonymous. Think of your life in its time as a piece of music, where allopathic (Western) medicine plays the spectacular bits on one staff, and complementary medicine and healthy living come in with the obbligatos and the chords on other staffs. Read more »
By Eva van Loon -Cognition Therapist
R U hooked on phonics? Then don’t expect miracles.
R U hooked on phonemics? You’re on the right road, the shorter, more natural one. Trouble is, it’s still a narrow track-not much phonemics around.
Remember that program that took the concerned-parent world by storm about two decades ago, Hooked on Phonics? If it worked for you or your kids, the chances are that your visual-processing function in the brain was working well.
It didn’t work? Chances are the brain you were working with suffers from today’s most common learning problem, auditory-processing deficit. Any kind of phonics is a waste of time for that brain. Stop torturing yourselves. As an article in the Wikipedia says about the most popular phonics program ever, “The program is better for some groups than for others. Among the criticisms, adult native English-speaking illiterates would recognize most of the words because they have large vocabularies. But children or non-native speakers, who know the meanings of fewer words, could be left clueless.” Duh!
Clueless is a good word for the phonics approach to reading. Why? Because phonics teaches students to relate letters to the sounds of English. Seems okay, doesn’t it? But reflect a moment: how did you learn to speak English? From the way it sounds, naturally! Your brain learned to recognise the sounds of English so as reproduce them.
Enter phonemics. Instead of teaching your brain to relate letters to sounds, phonemics teaches your brain to relate sounds to letters, or combinations of letters.
This is a good thing, because English is maddeningly illogical. Take this example: phonics sets the letters ea in front of the brain and says, “These letters make the sound ee.” Read more »
By Lesley Thorsell
What can we do for our own body’s environment? How do we clear the toxins and debris away so that our immune system stays strong and healthy?
These are questions that people seem to ask themselves, especially in the spring when it feels like a time to cleanse and renew, as nature does.
The first obvious choice is to do a cleanse-buy a prepared one like Firstcleanse or drink purified water and teas made from nettle, burdock root, dandelion leaves, elderberries and hot lemon.
• Drink green tea regularly-highly antioxidant.
• Check your PH-if there is one thing you do for yourself this year, get some PH strips and see if your body is acid or alkaline (check out ph-ion.com).
• If your body is acidic, cut back on processed and packaged food. Reduce white flour, sugar, alcohol and coffee.
• Increase use of lemons, grapefruit, onions and garlic: these all have an alkalizing effect. The juices from green vegetables are also highly alkalizing. Alkaline water is now available, for more information search Kangen Water.
• Drink wheatgrass. It is a powerhouse detoxifier and has 70% chlorophyll. It transports valuable nutrients to every cell of your body and removes waste while rebuilding immune system.
• Alkalizing your body regulates metabolism, increases athletic performance, builds stamina and delivers pure energy. Disease and arthritis CANNOT survive in an alkaline environment.
• Find your mojo! Enjoying what you do, exploring your passion, practising yoga, laughing, and being with people you love also increases your ALKALINITY!
• Step into an infrared sauna regularly- detoxifies, softens skin, reduces stress and increases weight loss.
• Soak in Epsom salt baths to help release toxins.
• Dry-brush before going into shower-use a natural bristle brush in a circular motion towards heart - great for lymphatic drainage and increased blood flow. Read more »
Here I sit, with an extraordinary headache and definite nausea, wondering if somehow I’ve already caught IT in remote Powell River, as I wait for my daughter to step off the plane from attending one of the biggest conferences on the continent, ‘way down in sticky-hot Atlanta. A zillion people attended this event—and she’s had a chance of catching something from every one of them. Cheery thought!
Who isn’t worrying about swine flu this season? The Powers That Be have spent enough advertisement dollars scaring us to death about it—what’s really going on?
I’ve done hours of reading and listening online, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Swine flu isn’t appreciably more dangerous than the regular flu we’ve come to know and love. You’ll probably get over it, no problem, unless you’re already sick or compromised by a weak immune system.
When this flu variety is talking tough, it seems to kill two types of people: young adults, and unhealthy people. So, if you’re obese, diabetic, or saddled with a chronic illness, consider boosting your immune system.
The swine flu is odd: it’s a mix of our old familiar flu, the good old swine flu from past pandemics, and avian flu. How the heck can that happen?—outside a laboratory, that is. Were the birds and the pigs getting it on in some corner of the world? I feel so dumb about the “science”.
The immunity you achieve from suffering a bout of this flu is far, far stronger than the immunity provided by a vaccine, and lasts longer, according to some medics.
by Corey Matsumoto
Dr. F. Batmanghelidj is an M.D. who once found himself in a situation where a person was suffering excruciating stomach ulcer-induced abdominal pain and there was no medication immediately available for treatment. He gave the patient (a fellow cell mate in an Iranian prison during the 1979 Iranian Revolution) 2 glasses of water for lack of options, and within 8 minutes the debilitating pain was completely gone. Dr. B. instructed him to take 2 glasses of water every 3 hours, and thus ended the ulcer pains for his remaining 4 months in prison. He sucessfully treated over 3000 fellow inmates—and ordinary water proved its effectiveness every time.
This woke Dr. Batmanghelidj up and got him thinking about why the pain-relieving properties of water has not been mentioned in medical school. Upon his release from prison in 1982, the doctor escaped from Iran and moved to the United States where he began to research the effects of dehyration on the human body. Ten years later he published his first book, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water in which he states that the body signals a water shortage by producing pain. The book has since been translated into 15 languages.
His research found that a dry mouth is not at all a reliable indicator of dehydration since by the time this symptom appears, many delicate functions of the body have already shut down. “This is exactly how the aging process is established—through a loss of enzyme function. A dehydrated body loses sophistication and versatility.”
According to Dr. Batmanghelidj, dehydration induces pain and many degenerative diseases including asthma, arthritis, hypertension, angina, adult-onset diabetes, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.
by Kevin E. Abrams
Described by many as a committed humanitarian, Italian oncologist Dr. Simoncini is strongly critical of the “global medical system operating in what is a scientific dead end, that is of no help whatsoever to the patients.”
In the US, a cancer patient who opts for surgery must agree to take chimo and radiation—both of which, according to Dr. Simoncini, are carcinogenic. Plus, surgery often makes matters worse by taking only the outside of a tumor, whereupon the fungal cancer cells at the center of the tumor promptly learn from their mistakes and carry on proliferating.
He writes, “Many have begun to sense medicine is becoming stalled. It has become too anchored in outdated concepts, and incapable of proposing innovative ones upon which to build new foundations for medical knowledge. Genetics, the battle horse of modern oncology, is about to give up the ghost, together with its endless explanations based on enzymatic and receptor processes.” Actually, “it has already failed – it’s just that no one can think of anything else to take its place.” Bold words. “The basic theories upon which current oncology rests are wrong, with the consequence of making any research useless and non-productive, Dr. Simoncini elaborates, “The philosophy of science suggests that, where it is impossible to find a solution with the conceptual instruments that are commonly accepted, a counter-intuitive behavior (that is, opposite to what has been followed so far) must be adopted.”
Hope springs eternal! Enter the fungi—and the study of mycology, the lifecycles of fungus, yeasts and molds. Thus the title of his new book, Cancer Is a Fungus: A Revolution in Tumor Therapy. Notice Simoncini doesn’t ask, “Is cancer a fungus?” but rather states it with factual certitude states it is so. Read more »
by Tamara McIntee—Chartered Herbalist
For me, burdock brings back fond memories of forest walks with my sister. At the end of a walk, we would have to stay outside to pick the burrs off our clothing. Little did I know at the time of this plant’s remarkable healing properties. Read more »
by Shirly McCune
Reiki is a traditional healing form rediscovered in Japan in the 1800s by Mikado Ususi and brought to North America in 1934 by Hawayo Takato.
Rei: Universal, light
Ki: Life force energy, breath Read more »
by Kevin E. Abrams
The Untold Story of Milk, by Ron Schmid, N.D., could also be A Complete History of Milk in North America, possible material for a Michael Moore documentary. A practising naturopathic physician, MIT graduate, teacher at all four of America’s naturopathic medical schools, and past Clinic Director and Chief Medical Officer at the University of Bridgeport College of Naturopathic Medicine, the author sifts through the political, medical and corporate currents that swept us from green pastures and the healthy, certified, raw-milk dairies of yesterday, to the centralized collection, pasteurisation, homogenisation and distribution of most dairy products today. Cardiologist Doctor Kurt Oster writes, “Milk has been changed over the years by processing, into an unrecognizable physicochemical emulsion which bears very little resemblance to the original, natural, and nutritional milk.”
The story really begins with the American/British war of 1812, which resulted in the severing of America’s whiskey supply from the British East Indies and the birth of the domestic liquor industry. By 1814, every major [American] city had one or more distilleries, where grains were turned into whiskey. As cities grew, demand for milk and whiskey increased. The distillation process produced an acid refuse known as “distillery slop”, which was then fed to cows. For convenience, owners housed cows in confinement stalls next to distilleries, feeding hot slop directly to the animals as it poured off the stills. The (swill or blue) milk, Schmid writes, “was defective in properties (enzymes) essential to good milk,” and could not be made into butter or cheese. Read more »