EDN Themes: Mind & Body

Listed below are entries for the Mind & Body theme. Related entries can be found through keyword searches. For example, creativity can be found in other themes. Using Google "Search This Site" to do a keyword search for "creativity" reveals related entries in other themes.

Healing: Vital Energy and the Creation of Health

In Vital Energy: The Seven Keys to Invigorate Body, Mind and Soul Dr. David Simon poses two important questions: 1) Why are so many people overwhelmed by fatigue, lack of enthusiasm, and depression? 2) Why are so many people haunted by the sense that something vitally important is missing from their lives?

Simon believes that we have lost connection to our most vital sources of energy in life. He suggests that we face a critical issue when it comes to our health and well being, that is, we have learned a lot about how to treat illness but not much about how to create health. Part of the issue is that our definition of disease must be expanded. The learning required centres on finding equilibrium between reactive medical intervention and proactive development of health. This search for equilibrium means we seek to learn the essential unity across mind-body-spirit...

Health: Adverse Prescription Drug Interactions

Little did I know when I wrote Health: Faint Warning - Adverse Drug Reactions last February that I would be personally immersed in a struggle to help my mother overcome adverse drug reactions in August. The problem was so severe that a heart attack or stroke would not have been surprising had the problem been left to fester. My mother is now home from the hospital and out of immediate danger, but she still has a number of weeks before the medications prescribed by her family doctor will leave her system. Imagine, an 83 year-old woman suffering through withdrawl symptoms. She is now eating again and is rehydrated. Based on my own experiences, I would like to share some personal advice on this issue that may be of help to anyone dealing with prescribed medicines...

Health: Alcohol and the Brain

Recent research has shown that we need to Cancel Happy Hour: Alcohol Shrinks Brain (Source: Ding, J, Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, January 2004.).

"But this is the first to show that even moderate drinking -- causes the same sort of brain atrophy and it occurs as early as in middle age"...

Health: Faint Warning - Adverse Drug Reactions

Do we really understand how prescription medications are affecting our health? How much science is really behind this? The issue of adverse reactions to prescribed medications became an important issue to me after hearing Ron's story about his life threatening experience with Lipitor. In Faint Warning CBC news report that outlines the history and current initiatives in tracking and responding to adverse drug reactions. There are a number of important implications for us all...

Health: Nutrition vs. Corporate Obesity

I recently purchased The Complete Guide to Nutritional Health by Pierre Jean Cousin and Kirsten Hartvig (n.b. - I don't see a listing for this on Amazon, but Vitality Foods for Health & Fitness by the same authors looks very similar).

Reading this book reminded me of the wave of news stories emerging about childhood obesity, for example, Growing Problem of Children's Waists. Similar articles appeared in other places, for example, Childhood Obesity Accelerating, Study Finds and Children Getting Fatter, Claims Survey.

Food is a necessity in life, yet we continue to allow the production and marketing of food that is clearly lacking in nutritional value. And the learning environment surrounding nutrition is one full of twists, turns and contradictions...

Health: Preservation or Prescription - The Twilight of Vioxx

Regardless of how much scientific knowledge we might think we have about the use of prescription drug medications, the use of them remains largely an exercise in trial and error. The recent voluntary and worldwide withdrawl of Vioxx by Merck & Co. was the result of a long-term study that revealed patients using Vioxx are twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke. If a single prescription medication can have these kinds of consequences over time, it leaves one to wonder what multiple prescription drug interactions might have in store for us. Noticeably absent in many discussions about prescription medications is the vital and essential role of preventative health...

Healthcare: Banning Health Supplements

Health supplements (optimizers, dietary, etc.) are currently swimming in a wash of international controversy. At the core of the battle are the various health regulators' desire to gain control over the health supplement market vs. the individual's right and responsibility to make decisions about their own health. One of the battle grounds for the controversy are, not surprisingly, weblogs. It's interesting to explore the relationship between the two...

Healthcare: Hospitals and Branding - Where is the care in healthcare?

Last Saturday night my father and I had to take my mother to Royal Victoria Hospital. The experience has left me wondering how a hospital can expect to build trust and respect with people, let alone provide meaningful care. Certainly little of this happened that night. The conversation, if it even remotely resembled that, I had with the doctor on duty was barren. I also had the opportunity to gain numerous insights into the backroom operations of the hospital through a conversation with a police officer (I will refer to him as Gary - not his real name) that opened my eyes to how things really work, at least in this particular hospital. I'll start with his comments since to some extent they help to clarify the abysmal experience my mom had (what follows is not a journalistic investigation complete with proper research - these are merely reflections on the experience itself)...

Improvisation: Learning and the Improvisation of the Senses

The development of perceptual acuity is an important dimension of learning [Refer: Probe - Learning Is Improvisation]. A great of the most interesting thoughts about perception come to us by way of the artist. This is not surprising since it is the artist that constantly seeks new ways to apprehend experience. We commonly tend to think in terms of concepts, or ideas that have already been given form in our thoughts. Perception is about what happens before thoughts and ideas are formalized in our minds and, more importantly, how we can expand our perceptual abilities to energize learning. The role of perception in learning demands that we challenge not only what we think we know, but also how we come to know something...

Psychological Warfare: SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistence, Escape) - A School For Torture

The idea of training is focused on the teaching of practical or vocational skills that have a specific application. In the military, training is the medium in which people are prepared for warfare. The New York Times recently published Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us that refers to "a school for torture" designed to simulate the experiences of prisoners of war in Korea and Vietnam. This school is known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistence, Escape) in which trainees experience forms of torture in order to prepare themselves in the event they are captured...

Psychology: Anger Management - Emotional Conformity or Therapy?

In BBC News: Look Back at Anger questions are raised about anger management. Is it a new form of emotional conformity or an authentic form of therapy designed to help reduce a real problem? Either/or scenarios like these can be misleading since they focus our attention on the opposite ends of a spectrum, but it is interesting to use such questions as probes into the issue...

Psychology: Anger, Violence and the daimonic

Anger, Violence and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity Stephen Diamond distinguishes some important differences between anger and psychopathology...

Psychology: Counseling - Solution or Problem?

The idea of providing counseling is held by many societies as a means to provide advice to people who are experiencing difficulties. The advice is often framed as a means to develop a plan of action to help overcome problems. In a CNN article called School Counselors Stetched Thin we read yet another article that insipidly describes a looming crisis on the horizon. This crisis is the lack of counselors to support the increasing number of student issues and problems in the school system. Safe to say that the role of the counselor in school, and society in general, is an important one that we have enbraced for centuries, yet articles like these are so narrow in focus as to render the message ineffective...

Psychology: Manufacturing Victims

In Manufacturing Victims: What the psychology industry is doing to people. Dr.Tana Dineen investigates the possibility that the psychology industry literally turn patients into victims in order to create a steady supply and demand of psychological problems the industry can profit from. This perspective provides a dark perspective on the linkages between corporatism, marketing, revenue generation and psychological well being. As uncomfortable as it is to consider, the idea of manufacturing victims is backed by a wide range of concrete evidence described by Dr. Dineen. The underlying premise behind manufacturing a victim is to impose a deep sense of need in people (the supply) so that the solutions being offered by the business of psychology can be distributed (the demand). We are all familiar with this approach when it comes to more commonplace marketing that encourages us to purchase material objects such as a car, a stereo, or a book. But in Dineen's realm this approach leads us into more horrific and evil territory, that is, psychological well being as an economic opportunity...

Psychology: Prepared Learning

The idea of "prepared learning" comes to us through the realm of evolutionary psychology. Since I briefly referred to this idea in Survival: Lifesense and Learning it makes sense to try and tease this idea out a little more. The importance of this idea is clear: if part of our learning is in fact "prepared" then the ability to learn is inescapably biased in some way...

Psychology: The Emotional Point of View

To assume an emotional point of view. At first glance this statement might impress us with the idea of a somewhat out of control reaction to a situation. That is, emotions in contrast to a rationale point of view. Of course, this distinction is utter nonsense, or perhaps better phrased as udder none-sense. In reading through my notebooks, I came across this quotation I took down while watching a movie quite a while ago...

Psychology: Victimization - Puppet on a String

The notion of victimization was introduced in this web log via an entry entitled Authentic Victims Are Not Big Business. At the core of victimization is the power to influence with the intent to deceive. People are manufactured into victims through veiled webs of deception and manipulation. Of course, when it serves to manufacture trust and compassion influence can be beneficial. Developing a better understanding of how we are being influenced, deceived, manipulated and victimized (and how we may knowingly or unknowingly do this to other people ourselves) is one important dimension of what it means to learn...

Research Archive: Mind & Body

A list of Mind & Body resources powered by Furl, Feedburner, and Feed2JS:

Stress: The Unification of Disease

A Definition of Disease published in FuturePositive integrates various forms of stress we experience in life into a unified concept of disease. One of the most basic weaknesses of Western medicine is that biological function is treated in isolation. The result is that our medical concept of health is often experience as a reaction to disease. This can most clearly be seen is the proliferation of prescription medication. This is not to say, of course, that providing an effective response to existing diseases is a weakness. The progress medical science has made in providing effective intervention in the various diseases that plague humankind is a compelling achievement. However, it is also true to say that a great deal of the emphasis placed on the idea of disease in medical science is often reactive and limited to human biology...