Asbestos starts life as a mineral found in certain rocks, mainly in South America. It is fibrous in nature and has fire retardant properties. Asbestos has been widely used as a building material for over 100 years. It can be found in cement pipes and sheets as a reinforcing agent. These asbestos cement products can be found in many schools, factories and homes. Asbestos was also used to make floor tiles and as insulation lagging on hot water pipes. Over the past 20 -30 years researchers and medical opinion has united against any asbestos use at all. Asbestos containing materials let asbestos fibers off into the air. These fibers lodge in the lungs of people working and living in the building and cause a disease called asbestosis, or mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is an incurable cancer of the lung. It only takes one asbestos fiber in the lung to cause asbestosis. Asbestos workers are the people most affected by asbestosis and mesothelioma. People who worked in construction and ship building in the 1950s and 1960s are also commonly affected. The...

From the time you were a newborn how well you thrived depended in large part by how much you were lovingly touched. I was born two months premature in Trinidad in 1965. I was only 4 pounds and had to be in an incubator for my first few weeks of life. The doctors told my mom not to get attached to me because I only had a ten percent chance of surviving. My mother didn t believe them. And touched and loved me and willed me to live. I grew into being a 6 3 , 200 pound man in almost perfect health. Such is the power of love, such is the power of touch. We tend to get touched less and less as we get older, although our primal need for touch never diminishes. Touch deprivation is a significant form of sensory deprivation. Most of us wouldn t dream of going weeks or months without opening our eyes, or keeping our ears plugged, yet many of my patients tell me that they haven t been massaged or held for weeks or months. Our world is becoming too formal, too stiff, too emotionally cold. For the sake of your physical, emotionally, mental and spiritual...

Self Improvement has become mainstream. In the last few years, since I have been writing articles and submitting them to article sites, I ve noticed that the category of Self Improvement has been showing up lately when it was never there before. To me, this is very good news. But what does it really mean to Self Improve. What are we really improving when we self improve. And what self are we improving. We each have two selves our wounded self and our core Self. Our core Self is our true self, our natural soul self our essence. Our core Self is our passion, our joy, our gifts and talents, our ability to love, our creativity. We come into this life as our core Self, and when this Self is loved and valued by our parents, we continue to naturally grow our God-given gifts and talents and manifest the fullness of our beings. This Self wants to improve by learning the skills necessary to fully express itself. But when this Self is not seen and valued in the way we needed, we create an alternative self, a self we hope will have control over getting the...

Americans fear Alzheimer s disease more than any illness other than cancer-and for older people, concerns about Alzheimer s outrank even cancer. More than a third of all Americans know a family member or friend who has Alzheimer s, and nearly two-thirds of Americans believe they will have to provide care someday for someone with Alzheimer s. These are just some of the results from a January 2006 MetLife Foundation Harris Interactive poll of American adults. The survey, found in MetLife Foundation Alzheimer s Survey: What America Thinks, included questions about how people view Alzheimer s disease, what they know about it and what they are doing to plan for a future that may include the deadly illness. A progressive brain disorder that science has yet to defeat, Alzheimer s gradually destroys a person s memory and ability to reason, communicate and function. Currently, 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer s disease, and the Alzheimer s Association estimates that these numbers will grow to as many as 16 million Americans by 2050. Increasing age is...

In this article I do not want to repeat all the information on the internet about the history of FM Alexander and how he developed his techniques. What I do want to concentrate on is precisely how The Alexander Technique can be used as part of an adjunctive strategy along with other techniques, with respect to alleviating your Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome symptoms. All the techniques I detail have a way of dove-tailing into each other and symbiotically deepening the effects of each other. Basically, my angle on the Alexander Technique is that I want to take what I need from the techniques and apply them directly to assist with the musculoskeletal problems that are maintaining patients Fibro and CFS symptoms. Bottom line: There is a way of moving that your body likes and a way that it doesn t. When you have an injury or imbalance there is a way of moving that helps the body heal and a way that prevents it from healing. All musculoskeletal conditions have varying symptoms and present in different ways, but all have one thing in...