EasyBloom is a great tool for the gardener—especially one born with a black thumb. This little device tells you if your plants need water, diagnoses ailing plants, and makes plant recommendations (based on real conditions) as to which plants will thrive at a particular site.
To begin using EasyBloom, plug the device into one of your computer’s USB ports and choose which of the three functions you want to use: recommend mode, monitor mode, or water mode.
Recommend mode—provides plant recommendations for a particular site, indoors or outside.
Monitor mode—gives expert advice in caring for an existing plant.
Water mode—provides immediate feedback on whether a plant needs water.
Once the mode is set, unplug the device from your computer and connect it to the sensor base. I chose the recommend mode and stuck the EasyBloom into a shady site in my back yard. Twenty-four hours later I plugged the device into my computer to receive my recommendations.
EasyBloom analyzed the site, providing the relative humidity, average temperature, and sunlight, then recommended a list of plants that should thrive in that location. To my surprise, it also gave me the opportunity to add pictures, take notes, and store the information in an archive section called “my readings.”
I also tried EasyBloom in its water mode. In this mode the device beeps when your plants need water. Unfortunately, none of the pots were dry at the time. I have not yet tried the monitor mode, which is designed to aid in diagnosing the problems plaguing an ailing plant.
I loved the design of the battery casing. A band encircles the battery which allows for easy removal and a means to easily disengage the battery when the device is not in use.
The EasyBloom website is user friendly, offering videos to help you learn to use the device and contact information for customer service. It also contains a database of more than 5000 plants with planting and care instructions and a feature that allows you to choose and store a listing of your favorite plants.
EasyBloom is a great device. Even though it does not analyze soil (I do so wish it would at least give me the ph), it is an excellent gardening aid, especially for the novice gardener. Coupled with the online resources, it is well worth its $60.00 price tag.
Many desk workers struggle with neck or back pain, shoulder strain, headaches, repetitive strain injury, or have trouble focusing, even with an ergonomically correct setup at work. Susi Hately Aldous, Yogi, author, kinesiologist, and founder of Functional Synergy, has created a specialized program, Yoga for the Desk Jockey™ for desk workers.
Here, she shares a few very simple techniques for the desk worker (or anyone dealing with stress). These easy, two-minute exercises alleviate pain and reduce tension through easy stretching, breathing, and overall movement of the body.
Finding Calmness in a Sometimes Complex World
By the middle of the day, does your mind feel overworked? Do your shoulders ache or your neck cramp? Or does that familiar feeling of tension enter into the space between your shoulder blades?
If, at that moment, you take time to consciously breathe, stretch or move your body, not only will your body feel better, but your mind will clear, your creativity will rise, and your work output will improve. Better yet, your connections with colleagues, customers, and clients will strengthen.
Sitting with feet on the ground, breathe.
Inhale, roll your shoulders to your ears.
Exhale, pull your shoulder blades together and down your back.
Repeat 10 times, keeping the jaw, eyes and tongue relaxed.
Flow fact: Moving your body helps unwind the “jumbled” feeling in the head that comes with overwork and stress. You’ll become clearer, calmer, and more creative.
Release Your Hips
The hips, especially in women, can hold a concentrated amount of tension whether you’re sitting for extended periods of time or standing on your feet for hours at a time. “I am really keen on enabling people to find a sense of ease and evenness during workdays, no matter what deadlines or curveballs occur,” says Susi. She suggests doing this hip release exercise to balance any tension held there.
Stand and hold the wall, the back of your chair, or your desk for support.
While standing, lift your right ankle onto your left knee.
Gently bend your left knee. Breathe through your nose.
Relax your jaw and shoulders, and breathe easily for 5 to 10 breaths.
You may feel some leg strengthening as well as hip releasing.
Be sure there is no knee pain. If there is, ease up to a position where you feel no pain.
Switch sides.
Flow Fact: By releasing your hips you can reduce back pain, improve leg strength, and build pelvic stability.
Twist It Out
The core area of the body may oftentimes feel stress from nervousness or digestive problems that can hit anyone morning or night. “I love this particular twist when I am spending my day working on the computer,” says Susi. “It helps wring out tension in the back, neck, and shoulders.”
Sit tall, feet firmly planted, sitting bones equally positioned on the chair.
Place your right hand on your left knee and your left hand behind you on your chair seat.
Inhale, and as you exhale, twist to your left. Be easy – don’t go to your maximum.
Take two more breaths and then switch direction.
Be sure you can breathe easy and your jaw is relaxed.
Flow Fact: Nervous tension in the belly can lead to back pain, eye strain, and general uneasiness. Releasing the associated muscular tension can bring much ease, calmness, and clarity.
Chest Release to Ease the Neck, Shoulders and Back
Whether you use a laptop, BlackBerry, or desktop computer or whether you drive, fly, or sit at a desk for most of the working day, the tendency after a few hours of work is to slouch – spine rounded and head poking forward. When this type of posture is held for a period of time, the muscles in the chest and neck tighten. The following exercise releases the muscles of your chest to reinvigorate and rejuvenate:
Sit at the edge of your chair with equal weight on your sitting bones.
Feel your feet planted on the floor. Relax your toes. Breathe.
Gently fist your hands, with thumbs pointing up to the ceiling.
Move your arms backward – you may feel this in your chest and/or your arms.
Relax your jaw and keep your shoulders relaxed and moving down your back (don’t let them round forward).
Breathe four or five times, then release. Repeat three to five times, slowly and easily.
Flow fact: Releasing the muscles of the chest can ease tension in the neck, jaw, and back.
Your body changes from day to day and you alone know your body best. Please be responsible with it – move with awareness and in your pain free range of motion.
LüSa Organics Product Review
LüSa’s products have become my “guilty pleasure.” Why? Because I am hoarding all the samples sent to OLM. I love these products. I refuse to share. Everything about them is appealing – from the packaging to the company’s philosophy and business practices.
LuSa states their intention is, “To make soap so good that you have a better day just for having washed with it. Then your better day inspires another’s better day and the whole world spirals into happiness.” I for one believe in the ripple effect. And these products do make me happy!
I love the packaging. I don’t like clutter on my bathroom countertops, but LuSa’s products remain stacked in plain sight though I have plenty of room in my drawers and cabinets. The cobalt blue glass jars with the grey, lavender, and green labels are very appealing.
LuSa’s products include soaps, essential oil blends, lip balms, body scrubs, bath salts, baby skin care products, and a few other products for mom and baby.
These handcrafted soap bars last two to three times longer than any natural soap I have ever tried, and the scents are heavenly. Just imagine eucalyptus and lavender, lemongrass and ginger, or spicy orange and cinnamon. LuSa’s website offers 21 varieties of handcrafted bar soaps including calendula baby soap, which is also a great facial soap for adults with hypersensitive skin. Soap bars are sold packaged or “naked” for a savings of 60 cents per bar.
Do you need to exfoliate? Or want to relax in a warm bath? LuSa’s organic sugar scrubs and bath salts come in four scents: citrus, lavender, mint, and patchouli. Refills are available at a reduced price.
Gift collections include two collections for baby and two for new moms as well as standard collections and a soap of the month club. Baby products include reusable baby wipes and liquid “Baby Juice” for cleaning baby’s bottom as well as “Booty Balm,” a remarkable salve for skin irritated by anything from diaper rashes to cuts and scrapes.
LuSa Organics is a small family operation committed to supporting local and regional economies. Their ingedients are naturally sourced, primarily organic, and consistently high quality. They scent their products with essential oils and create color with natural pigments, herbs, and clays. Ten percent of LuSa’s annual profits are donated to organizations creating positive global change.
Check out LuSa Organic’s website to discover all of their products for adults, children, and babies. www.lusaorganics.com
Monsanto Company Profile Part I of IV
If ever there was a company that stands for everything Organic Lifestyle Magazine stands against, it’s Monsanto. To us they are the villain, a company that embodies virtually everything we at OLM believe to be wrong with big business today. We would be hard pressed to find a company whose products have done more to harm our planet.
Many argue that Monsanto’s potential to devastate life as we know it is second only to producers of atomic bombs. Ironically, Monsanto was also heavily involved in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the world’s first nuclear bomb.
Monsanto started in 1901 as a chemical company. Their first product was saccharine, a coal tar product, which has had a controversial history. You may know it as Sweet‘N Low, the artificial sweetener sold in little pink packages.
Though saccharin was their first, Monsanto is also well known for many other chemical and chemically based products including Agent Orange, Bovine Growth Hormone, Polychlorinated biphenyl (commonly known as PCBs), Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), and RoundUp.
Today, Monsanto is a leader in the bio-tech industry selling RoundUp ready GMO seeds. Its main crops are soy, cotton, sugar beets, and canola. Its controversial bovine growth hormone, rBST, was sold to the Eli Lilly Company earlier this year.
We asked Brad Mitchell, Director of Public Affairs for Monsanto if we were dealing with a new Monsanto since our take on Monsanto’s reputation is one of deception, corruption, bribery, and environmental degradation, a company that made significantly bad choices.
“I think more than anything, it’s a new age,” he said. “…I think you’re holding the Monsanto of the middle part of the 20th century against the standards of today. So, for instance, if you look at PCBs we all know today that what Monsanto did there was wrong. It shouldn’t have been done. Did we, Monsanto, or society as a whole know in the 60s or the 50s that that was wrong? I don’t think that we were as environmentally sophisticated as we are today.
“…I’m not saying that we’re not liable, that we shouldn’t have done it, and all that, but you know, when you make these kind[s] of statements about how Monsanto obviously disregarded human health and public safety and the environment for profit, I wasn’t there. I can’t tell you what was in people’s hearts and minds. I do believe, however, that to some extent we’re being held against today’s standards for actions that occurred half a century ago.”
Perhaps we could agree that these actions occurred half a century ago if Monsanto had voluntarily embarked on a clean-up of PCB contamination in Anniston, Alabama, in any decade following the 50s or 60s. If they had, perhaps we could believe the corporation has grown a conscience. According to The Washington Post, it was February 2002 when Monsanto was held liable by an Alabama jury for all six counts it considered: negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage. The Post quotes the legal definition of outrage under Alabama law as conduct, “so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society.”
The Center for Food Safety maintains a website, www.monsantowatch.org. On this site they report, “In August, 2003, Monsanto and its former chemical subsidiary, Solutia, Inc. (now owned by Pharmacia Corp.), agreed to pay $600 million to settle claims brought by more than 20,000 residents of Anniston, AL, over the severe contamination of ground and water by tons of PCBs dumped in the area from the 1930s until the 1970s. Court documents revealed that Monsanto was aware of the contamination decades earlier.”
History tells us Monsanto was well aware of the damage their silence and lack of action brought Anniston as The Center for Food Safety also reports,
The world’s center of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto’s plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois, which has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state. By 1982, nearby Times Beach, Missouri, was found to be so thoroughly contaminated with dioxin, a by-product of PCB manufacturing, that the government ordered it evacuated.”
Monsanto can, however, claim the Monsanto of today is not the Monsanto of yesteryear. According to Wikipedia, the Monsanto of 1901-2000 and the current business are now two legally separate corporations, though they share the same name as well as many of the same executives and workers. The “new” Monsanto is an agricultural company (as opposed to a chemical company).
Are Monsanto’s misdeeds a thing of the past? In 2005, BBC News reported that Monsanto agreed to pay a $1.5 million dollar fine for bribing an Indonesian official “to avoid environmental impact studies being conducted on its [bio-tech] cotton.” Monsanto said it accepted full responsibility for its “improper activities” and agreed to three years of close monitoring of its business practices by American authorities.
GMO seeds were approved by the FDA under the GRAS designation—generally recognized as safe. As such, Monsanto’s bio-tech seeds were granted exemption from premarket approval by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Due to this ruling, the onus to ensure the safety of genetically altered food created by Monsanto rests with Monsanto, a company whose actions have revealed an unparalleled disregard for human life and environmental safety.
Opponents of GMOs often quote a cavalier statement made by Phil Angell, Monsanto’s former director of corporate communications to author Michael Pollan. In Pollan’s article, Playing God in the Garden, published in the New York Times Magazine in 1998, Angell is quoted as saying,
Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.”
We asked Brad Mitchell, Director of Public Affairs for Monsanto if we were dealing with a new Monsanto since our take on Monsanto’s reputation is one of deception, corruption, bribery, and environmental degradation, a company that made significantly bad choices. “I think more than anything, it’s a new age,” he said. “…I think you’re holding the Monsanto of the middle part of the 20th century against the standards of today. So, for instance, if you look at PCBs we all know today that what Monsanto did there was wrong. It shouldn’t have been done. Did we, Monsanto, or society as a whole know in the 60s or the 50s that that was wrong? I don’t think that we were as environmentally sophisticated as we are today.
…I’m not saying that we’re not liable, that we shouldn’t have done it, and all that, but you know, when you make these kind[s] of statements about how Monsanto obviously disregarded human health and public safety and the environment for profit, I wasn’t there. I can’t tell you what was in people’s hearts and minds. I do believe, however, that to some extent we’re being held against today’s standards for actions that occurred half a century ago.”
Perhaps we could agree that these actions occurred half a century ago if Monsanto had voluntarily embarked on a clean-up of PCB contamination in Anniston, Alabama, in any decade following the 50s or 60s. If they had, perhaps we could believe the corporation has grown a conscience. According to The Washington Post, it was February 2002 when Monsanto was held liable by an Alabama jury for all six counts it considered: negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage. The Post quotes the legal definition of outrage under Alabama law as conduct, “so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society.”
The Center for Food Safety maintains a website, www.monsantowatch.org. On this site they report, “In August, 2003, Monsanto and its former chemical subsidiary, Solutia, Inc. (now owned by Pharmacia Corp.), agreed to pay $600 million to settle claims brought by more than 20,000 residents of Anniston, AL, over the severe contamination of ground and water by tons of PCBs dumped in the area from the 1930s until the 1970s. Court documents revealed that Monsanto was aware of the contamination decades earlier.”
History tells us Monsanto was well aware of the damage their silence and lack of action brought Anniston as The Center for Food Safety also reports,
The world’s center of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto’s plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois, which has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state. By 1982, nearby Times Beach, Missouri, was found to be so thoroughly contaminated with dioxin, a by-product of PCB manufacturing, that the government ordered it evacuated.”
Monsanto can, however, claim the Monsanto of today is not the Monsanto of yesteryear. According to Wikipedia, the Monsanto of 1901-2000 and the current business are now two legally separate corporations, though they share the same name as well as many of the same executives and workers. The “new” Monsanto is an agricultural company (as opposed to a chemical company).
Are Monsanto’s misdeeds a thing of the past? In 2005, BBC News reported that Monsanto agreed to pay a $1.5 million dollar fine for bribing an Indonesian official “to avoid environmental impact studies being conducted on its [bio-tech] cotton.” Monsanto said it accepted full responsibility for its “improper activities” and agreed to three years of close monitoring of its business practices by American authorities.
GMO seeds were approved by the FDA under the GRAS designation—generally recognized as safe. As such, Monsanto’s bio-tech seeds were granted exemption from premarket approval by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Due to this ruling, the onus to ensure the safety of genetically altered food created by Monsanto rests with Monsanto, a company whose actions have revealed an unparalleled disregard for human life and environmental safety.
Opponents of GMOs often quote a cavalier statement made by Phil Angell, Monsanto’s former director of corporate communications to author Michael Pollan. In Pollan’s article, Playing God in the Garden, published in the New York Times Magazine in 1998, Angell is quoted as saying,
Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.”
When we asked Mr. Mitchell if he was familiar with this statement, he said he thought the statement had been made by a Monsanto foreman and that it was taken out of context. “I don’t know the gentleman, but I do know the general feeling here. There is nobody here at Monsanto that I know that says, ‘Screw safety, that’s not our problem, it’s FDA’s.’ I think what the gentleman quoted is referring to is that when it comes down to it, the law, by the law, it’s FDA’s responsibility. I don’t know a single person at Monsanto who does not believe that we have the responsibility. But if you want to look at the law, the final say on this, and the final arbiter, and the people legally charged with safely stating whether it’s safe or not is not Monsanto, it’s FDA.”
Mitchell tells us he and Monsanto’s scientific team have never seen a study that shows any significant risk associated with GMO foods.
I’ve worked with our scientific affairs team, so when studies come out to do analysis and that sort of thing, we have yet to see a study which we think shows us any significant risk with these things. So, those studies are best addressed on a one-on-one basis, and I would say that there are just as many studies, independent as well, that show (chuckles) that there are not risks with them [GMOs].”
He argues that the oft referenced study by Árpád Pusztai showing GMO potatoes was flawed. “My understanding is that there were only six animals in each control group, so statistical significance is pretty weak there.” In addition, he states that Pusztai did not go through the basic safety processes. “The premise of biotech safety in virtually every country that allows these things is something called substantial equivalence. You compare a genetically modified potato to a non-genetically modified potato against a whole bunch of parameters on stuff they contain. And essentially if it doesn’t cause any physiological or physiochemical differences in the potato, they’re deemed to be substantively equivalent, which means that they are pretty much the same with the exception of the protein that’s expressed in the genetically modified one. …Now the ironic part is that Pusztai, when he did his test, never analyzed the potatoes for substantial equivalence. And in fact there is very good evidence that snowdrop lectin [used in the study] will actually—the protein itself, will change the physiology of that potato where it would not meet the standards of substantial equivalence. So he’s testing a GM product that was never commercialized, that has never even been even through the most basic level of safety, with a poor study, that basically shows and basically came to the conclusion that all genetically modified crops have risks, when he hasn’t even done the basic tests that genetically modified crops go through before being approved.”
In 1997, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were hired by Fox Television as the researchers and stars of a new investigative news show, called The Investigators. Akre says they were told, “Do any stories you want. Ask tough questions and get answers.” One of the first stories they proposed was an expose on Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone, rBST, also known as Posilac. Their investigation revealed that Canada refused to approve Posilac, citing health concerns, that Posilac was linked to cancer, and that the FDA had rubberstamped the product without proper testing.
While Monsanto’s publicity stated, “Posilac is the single most tested new product in history,” Wilson and Akre’s investigation revealed that the longest test Monsanto had done for human toxicity was for 90 days on 30 rats.
Legal threats from Monsanto prompted Fox to kill the story and set in motion a chain of events that resulting in Fox firing Steve Wilson and Jane Akre for insubordination after several attempts failed to convince them to kill the story, re-write the story, or out and out lie about its contents. Fox even attempted to bribe the pair, offering them the rest of a year’s salary in exchange for their silence about the story and Fox’s part in it.
Brad Mitchell stated, “We would still contend that Monsanto [rBST] is a safe product. The FDA would support us on that. It’s still being used, albeit by a different company.”
Mitchell also tells us recent Internet rumors that Monsanto was opposed to or tried to prevent the labeling of milk as rBST free were absolutely untrue.
What we were trying to prevent was misleading labeling of milk as being rBST free. And many of the milk companies out there who were labeling it were doing so in a way that was in violation of FDA guidelines and made it basically sound like our product wasn’t safe, and the scientific consensus, at least in this country, was that it is.
“You know, we obviously would prefer that it wasn’t labeled that way, but our gripe was not against people who were labeling milk as rBST free; our real concern was people who were labeling it in opposition to what FDA guidelines set. And the vast majority of the state legislation and the things you saw really were just forcing milk labelers to label in accordance to those guidelines.
“I’ll give you an example, where some milk labels said it’s hormone free. Well, no milk is hormone free. It’s just misleading to say so. Now, if you want to say it’s rBST free, that’s better. What the FDA suggested was that it says this milk comes from cows not treated with rBST. Obviously we would prefer that people didn’t put that in writing and that people didn’t see a problem with our products. But if they were labeling milk accurately, we would not have had an issue with them.”
This company Highlight is continued in our next issue. Click to readMonsanto Company Profile Part II, Monsanto’s Turn. We will discuss Monsanto’s stand on patent infringement lawsuits and high yield potentials of GM crops, Europe’s attitude toward GMOs, and more.
As a mom of three young children, I think mothers lead the pack when it comes to excessive consumption. Just look at what we buy! Moms, I promise you, your children will not shrivel up and dehydrate if they don’t have a drink every 15 minutes– enough with the juiceboxes! In fact, drop the juice addiction altogether. Water’s what they really need. And the prepackaged snacks? Even the organic kind? Not healthy! You know what’s healthy and sustainable? An apple. From a tree.
I brought a whole new consumption awareness with me to the grocery store. I now buy very little that comes in plastic packaging. Kids need snacks for lunch? It’s raw fruits and veggies all the way… and I put the produce in my own canvas bags, not the plastic produce bags. We didn’t produce a lot of garbage before I went hardcore on my grocery habits, but now we use one small bag and it takes two weeks to fill it. So next time you go grocery shopping, ask yourself, “Do I really need this? Does the nutritional content of this product warrant its packaging?”
What about the toys and the clothes slick marketing schemes try to brainwash us into believing we need? What does that new baby really need? I promise you, the latest Pack and Play Portable Playard or the Fisher-Price Power Plus Swing and all the other crap that sits in a landfill six months after we bought it can’t be considered a necessity.
What about the brand new baby clothes dipped in flame retardant? Do you really want that stuff on your baby? My last child was born in June. I went to the Salvation Army and bought a bunch of onesies. It was hot. That was all she needed. The only other thing I bought was an Ergo (a baby carrier). That’s it. You don’t NEED all the plastic junk and the brand new clothes that you’re led to believe you can’t do without. All our babies need is a boob and a means to be tied to us—nothing more, nothing less.
The next time you get the impulse to buy something for your child, stop and think. Is your need just to connect? Do something with your child instead. Give your child your time, not more stuff. You’ll both feel more fulfilled.
Addicted to Coffee
I’ve had a coffee addiction for most of my adult life. When I say addiction, I mean ADDICTION! Once I start my first cup in the morning, I can’t stop. And I can’t drink weak coffee. I like high octane, dark roast, light a fire under your bum coffee. I’m not one of those people who can have a cup of coffee and then lay down for a nap. In fact I can’t drink coffee past 2 pm, or I’m up all night. This is a problem, since I already said once I start drinking coffee, I can’t stop.
I’m very committed to being healthy and consuming healthy foods. I tried to convince myself that since I drank organic coffee, it was healthy. I loved reading those studies about how coffee is good for you because it’s high in antioxidants. But, in the back of my mind, I knew better. Any health benefits were canceled out by the stress it caused my adrenals and kidneys. That all too familiar shaky feeling, the need to remind myself to breathe, the irritability. While I can completely blame all of my irritation on my husband, the short temper with my kids was inexcusable.
So I finally hit rock bottom. Coffee was making me way too manic, and my body way too acidic. My jaw was always clenched and my neck tight. I knew what I had to do. It took me months to finally make the attempt. I really didn’t think it was possible, not for me anyways. I had tried to stop in the past and it just didn’t work. It didn’t matter if I replaced my morning cup of coffee with tea or juice, I just wanted COFFEE!
Then I tried Teeccino. Teeccino is a non caffeinated coffee alternative made from roasted herbs. I had tried it in the past and it didn’t work for me. This time I was a little more committed and Teeccino had come out with different flavors. I tried their Maya CafféHerbal Coffee and after my first sip, I knew kicking my coffee habit was possible.
I weaned myself off the caffeine. I started out doing 3/4 coffee, 1/4 Teecino for about 3 days. Then I went down to half coffee, half Teeccino and so on and for 2 weeks until I had completely eliminated coffee. No headaches, no mood changes. I had a little bit of brain fog for the first couple of weeks but it eventually subsided. I probably could have avoided the brain fog if I had weaned myself off the caffeine slower. It’s been about 2 months since have kicked my coffee addiction. When I get up in the morning my head is clear and I feel great. I still go straight to the coffee maker to brew my Teeccino, but that’s just psychological. My body is thanking me.
The Ultra Mind Solution – Book Review
It’s unfortunate, but true. Medical doctors tend to attribute disease to a cause-and-effect paradigm that absolves the patient of responsibility. If you get sick, well, there’s a flu or a virus going around. If you get diabetes, sorry, but you are genetically programmed to get it. You can’t help it. If you have cancer, well, we never know why these things happen to some and not to others.
While these aren’t direct quotes from any specific doctor, this is the mindset of conventional medicine. There is very little accountability for health these days, along with a belief that most of our health issues are incurable and a resignation that we should accept the side effects of conventional treatment. While most people do resign themselves to this belief system, others, like Mark Hyman, M.D., do not.
Mark Hyman is a brilliant man, one of those people who can multitask, easily remember, and just plain excel in whatever task relies on his intelligence. But when he was in medical school, he did what many interns are forced to do—he pushed his body to unreasonable limits, working shifts up to 60 hours. Then he went to work in China for a year, breathing in the coal-soaked, mercury-laden air. After he came back to Massachusetts, he again lived with sleep deprivation when working crazy shifts in an inner-city emergency room. Then he realized he could no longer remember things easily. Sleep became problematic. He was drained—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Depression and anxiety became familiar parts of his life.
Unlike so many doctors who look for the “one thing” that caused the problem and the one treatment to alleviate the symptoms, Dr. Hyman recognized that his problem had more than one cause. In his book he says, “It was everything piled higher and higher until my brain and body couldn’t take any more.”
The Ultra Mind Solution title is a bit misleading, but at the same time, it’s perfect. If your brain is not working right, many health problems will arise. On the other hand, if your body is overburdened with toxins, lack of quality sleep, and a lack of nutrition, at some point the whole system is going to break down. Mark Hyman took a holistic approach. He decided if his brain was broken, his whole body was in trouble. He learned that many of today’s
