Friday, May 29, 2009

Creative Health Tip 29 May 2009



Here is your Heaven On Earth Creative Health Tip for this week:

Whatever is going on around you or in your life, Choose to find the good in it.

A lot of times, bad things happen to good people, and people often feel that you are at the mercy of the circumstances.

You may not be able to change the circumstances themselves, but you have absolute power over how you react.

If you react well, consider it as a learning experience, consider it as a way to gain knowledge, consider it as a way to take your power back, and not let all of these outside things just wash over you and cause you to tumble and fall and break. You will go a long way to creating excellent health for yourself.

If things happen and you let them make you crazy and stressed out, you are going to create illness for yourself. All that stress is just not going to sit well in your physical body, and eventually it will come to roost somewhere. You don't want that.

So, take back your power, make your choices good, and make the good choice to find the good thing in everything. There is always something good, even if it's just a learning experience or a way to help someone else out of a problem. If you can help someone else, you will often feel good about your own problems, and also find ways to help solve them, too.




Have a Heavenly weekend!

Michelle

Friday, May 22, 2009

Creative Health Tip 22 May 2009



Here is your Heaven On Earth Creative Health Tip for this week: Smile!

Smiling does amazing things for your body!

I was at a business meeting Wednesday evening and the lady who spoke talked about reducing stress. She pointed out that when you smile, something in your body automatically changes. The levels of your stress-reducing hormones rise – your "feel-good" hormones – that we have that create good health. The levels of your stress hormones lowers or decreases.

Just through the act of smiling, you cannot feel sad, mad, depressed, down; you just can't!

So, get a little smiley-face sticker and put it on your keychain, your briefcase, your computer monitor, or wherever you're going to see it, and every time you do see it, Smile!

Chinese medicine has taken the practice of smiling one step further. There is a practice called the Healing Smile, or the Inner Smile. (It goes by several other names also.)

The purpose of this practice is to create healthy organs by smiling at them!

Start by taking a couple of nice deep, cleansing breaths, relax yourself into a nice, comfortable seated position . . .

And smile at your lungs. See your lungs as healthy. See them as working perfectly, exchanging air and carbon dioxide with the outer world.

Next, move on to your heart. See your heart pumping strongly. See it moving blood through your body perfectly. Be appreciative of these organs that work so hard to keep you alive.

After you spend a couple of minutes on your heart, move to your stomach and spleen. Envision a nice, healthy stomach that helps digest your food so that you can absorb the nutrients, and the spleen which helps to remove used and toxic materials from your body.

Next, move on to your kidneys. Envision healthy kidneys. . .use your imagination! Create health for these organs that support you in your life.

The final organ is the liver. Envision a healthy liver. See it working perfectly, see it healthy, see it filtering all the things out of your blood that you no longer need circulating through your body.

When you are done spending a minute or two just smiling at each of your major organs, seeing each as healthy, seeing it working properly, seeing it working perfectly, take two or three nice, deep, cleansing breaths, and relax, and know that you are Creating Health for yourself!



Have a Heavenly and very safe Memorial Day weekend!

Michelle

Friday, May 15, 2009

Creative Health Tip 15 May 2009



Here is your Heaven On Earth Creative Health Tip for this week, a writing I found on the website of the Napoleon Hill (author of many books on the creative power of the mind) organization website:

Monthly Message from Dr. Napoleon Hill
Science of Success

August 10, 2005 http://www.naphill.org/foundation/message2.asp


BE GENEROUS by W. Clement Stone
Source: Success Unlimited, August 1964, p. 2.

BE GENEROUS! Give to those whom you love; give to those who love you; give to the fortunate; give to the unfortunate; yes – give especially to those to whom you don’t want to give.

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving. The more you give – the more you will have!

GIVE a smile to everyone you meet (smile with your eyes) – and you’ll smile and receive smiles . . .

GIVE a kind word (with a kindly thought behind the word) – you will be kind and receive kind words . . .

GIVE appreciation (warmth from the heart) – you will appreciate and be appreciated . . .

GIVE honor, credit and applause (the victor’s wreath) – you will be honorable and receive credit and applause . . .

GIVE time for a worthy cause (with eagerness) – you will be worthy and richly rewarded . . .

GIVE hope (the magic ingredient for success) – you will have hope and be made hopeful . . .

GIVE happiness (a most treasured state of mind) – you will be happy and be made happy . . .

GIVE encouragement (the incentive to action) – you will have courage and be encouraged . . .

GIVE cheer (the verbal sunshine) – you’ll be cheerful and cheered . . .

GIVE a pleasant response (the neutralized of irritants) – you will be pleasant and receive pleasant responses . . .

GIVE good thought (nature’s character builder) – you will be good and the world will have good thoughts for you . . .

GIVE prayers (the instrument of miracles) for the godless and the godly – you will be reverent and receive blessings – more than you deserve!

Be Generous! GIVE!



Have a Heavenly weekend!

Michelle

Monday, May 11, 2009

Conflicts of Interest Taint Medical Studies




















Well, this isn't much of a surprise, unless you consider how long it took for them to admit that favorable studies of pharmaceuticals are tainted and biased and often just plain lies. People in the alternative health-care field have been warning of this for years - literally! - but until now the mainstream has done its best to discredit them. Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot.

Personally, if my option were to trust the pharmaceutical industry and the current model of chronic-disease care, I wouldn't - and I don't. This may be just the thing that you need to snap yourself out of going along with the crowd, and finding yourself some Real holistic health care, and avoid the "find a drug to control your symptoms" mentality that oversees medical care these days!

Here's the story, finally reported by the mainstream media:

Conflicts of Interest Taint Medical Studies

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/conflictsofinteresttaintmedicalstudies

Robert Roy Britt Editorial Director livescience.com Mon May 11, 2009

A new review of studies finds 29 percent of cancer research published in high-profile journals had disclosed a conflict of interest.

While it's a good thing that the conflicts were disclosed, the review also found conflicts affect the research outcomes. The results, announced today, will be published June 15 in the journal Cancer.

The findings add to a mountain of evidence suggesting you should be skeptical of health and medical advice.

Other investigations have indicated that many medical studies simply are not accurate. Further, the media is known to distort key aspects of medical studies, twisting findings by virtue of ignorance, blowing obscure, unpublished "breakthroughs" out of proportion, and frequently failing to disclose industry funding even when the researchers do mention it.

Even common existing treatments can be found pointless, as in 2007 when researchers showed that honey works better than cough medicines in soothing children's coughs. [I have to admit, I don't find it "pointless" that researchers were able to protect children from drugs by proving that a safe, natural substance is actually better for them. Do you? ~M~]

Industry ties

Drugs are, of course, big business. So there is incentive to fund studies that will shine positive light on a drug. Other industries do the same. A recent study funded by gum-maker Wrigley found - no surprise - that chewing lots of its sugarfree gum can help you cut down on calories.

The most frequent type of conflict revealed by the new review was industry funding of the study, found in 17 percent of papers. In another 12 percent, at least one of the study authors was employed by the industry - drug companies and others aiming to market treatments to patients.

Drug trials with reported conflicts of interest were more likely to have positive findings, the review revealed.

"Given the frequency we observed for conflicts of interest and the fact that conflicts were associated with study outcomes, I would suggest that merely disclosing conflicts is probably not enough," said study author Dr. Reshma Jagsi, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan Medical School. "It's becoming increasingly clear that we need to look more at how we can disentangle cancer research from industry ties."

Many of the studies are likely wrong anyway, other research indicates.

Medical scholar John Ioannidis of the Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. has analyzed medical studies over the years and concludes that most are flawed by poor study design, bad math or self-serving data analysis. Other researchers have countered, however, that multiple studies of a given treatment tend to clearly bear findings out or refute them over time.

Conflict affects outcome

In the new study, Jagsi and her colleagues found other dubious outcomes. They looked at 1,534 cancer research studies published in prominent journals.

Studies that had industry funding focused on treatment 62 percent of the time, compared to 36 percent for other studies not funded by industry. And the studies funded by industry focus on epidemiology, prevention, risk factors, screening or diagnostic methods only 20 percent of the time, vs. 47 percent for studies that had declared no industry funding.

"A serious concern is individuals with conflicts of interest will either consciously or unconsciously be biased in their analyses," Jagsi said. "As researchers, we have an obligation to treat the data objectively and in an unbiased fashion. There may be some relationships that compromise a researcher's ability to do that."

For example, she said in a statement, researchers might design industry-funded studies in a way that's more likely to produce favorable results. They might also be more likely to publish positive outcomes than negative outcomes.

"In light of these findings, we as a society may wish to rethink how we want our research efforts to be funded and directed," Jagsi said. "It has been very hard to secure research funding, especially in recent years, so it's been only natural for researchers to turn to industry. If we wish to minimize the potential for bias, we need to increase other sources of support. Medical research is ultimately a common endeavor that benefits all of society, so it seems only appropriate that we should be funding it through general revenues rather than expecting the market to provide."

Jagsi and her colleagues looked at all original clinical cancer research published in five top oncology journals and three top general medical journals in 2006, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Media gets it wrong, too

There are other reasons for the average person to be skeptical about medical breakthroughs.

Peer-reviewed journals act as filters, with findings reviewed by capable colleagues before publication. Plenty of medical research that has yet to be published makes it into the popular media, too, where more distortions take place.

A study in 2006 found that out of 175 stories in the popular media that discussed unpublished research, only two noted that the research was unpublished.

But even if a study is published in a peer-reviewed journal, that doesn't mean the media will do its job. A 2008 study detailed in JAMA looked at 306 news articles, online and in newspapers, that dealt with about company-funded medication studies. Only 42 percent of the articles disclosed the fact that industry had funded the studies.

Friday, May 08, 2009

Stress Relief Tip 08 May 2009



Here is your Heaven On Earth Stress Relief Tip for this week!

You've heard that "music soothes the savage beast" or "whistle a happy tune and you'll feel less afraid."

It's very true that music does wonderful things for reducing stress.

We live in a very busy, fast-paced world, and your heart tries to keep up with whatever is going on in the environment around it. If you're working in a very busy, fast-paced, noisy office, your heart actually beats a little faster trying to keep up with everything that's going on, and that can lead you to feel stress.

If you can have a little iPod on your desk, or play background music (on a CD player or on your computer), play some classical or New Age music. Both these music styles will help you feel more relaxed. Especially at the end of your day, go home and play a soothing CD; put your feet up for a while and just let the stress of the day wash away.

Another thing you can do that really enhances how well you feel, reduces stress and makes you feel good, is to sing. It's musical again, but this time you're part of the process; you're involved in improving how you feel. [You're Creating Good Health!] If you sing a nice, fun , upbeat-tempo song, you will reduce the level of stress hormones and increase your level of healthy, feel-good hormones!

So, Sing a happy song, an have a heavenly weekend!

Michelle

Friday, May 01, 2009

Stress Relief Tip 01 May 2009



Here is your Heaven On Earth Stress Relief Tip for this week!

I would like to talk about Change today.

There has certainly been a lot of change in my life this week. I've had two people move into my house quite unexpectedly, I met with a business advisor who told me to change the focus of my business just a little bit – tweaking it and working on it. The classes that I teach in the evenings have taken a slightly different turn, and we're changing (just a little bit) how all of that works.

Life is all about change. The challenge is working with that change. The challenge can be finding how to make it work in your life.

A lot of change seems to be a struggle for most of us. We fight it, we "swim against the current," and that just leads to unhappiness; it can lead to disease.

If you find the good in the change, find how the change is going to help you, change your perspective on how you see change! That's a biggie. Dealing with change is all about perspective, it's about how you look at it.

No matter what is going on, there is some good in everything. To relieve your stress, to find your happiness, to get away from the "bad" and into the "good," examine it. Whatever is going on, if it's a problem, examine it from all sides.

A cube has six sides; write your problem on a cube and start looking at all those different sides. It will enable you to say, "Wow, I can see this good will come out of this difficult situation."

Go with the good. Concentrate on that instead of on the challenges. It will go a long way in relieving your stress.

Have a heavenly weekend!

Michelle