Praise

I love being praised, and today my praise cup is overflowing!

People are really appreciating the new web site http://www.mytherapypractice.com and the free therapist listing on http://healthandgoodness.com

Here's some of the comments I've received today:

• I would just like to thank you and your team for the dedication, time and energy you have put into setting up the mytherapy website.
• Congratulations on a great vision and concept and your willingness to see it happen.
• This is absolutely fabulous.
• This is just to congratulate you on a great site and wonderful effort. (Sweden)
• ***Congratulations for your websites!***They are great and made with a very beautiful energy. I love to surf on those waves!!! :):) (Belgium)
• This looks to be an excellent initiative. Highly professional!

It has involved such a lot of hard work and money so this makes me feel all warm inside.

How Do We Value Lives?

One of the things I find distressing is how natural disasters are reported in the media. A calamity involving 10 people in the UK, USA, Canada or Australia will be higher up the news stories and have more space or air time devoted to it in the UK than a calamity involving 100 people in eastern Europe or India or Africa.

Why is this less newsworthy? There are many people from eastern Europe now living and working in the UK - I don't know the figures so I don't know if it's less than the number of Americans or Australians. There are many people whose family originate in Africa or India - they at the very least would be interested, but shouldn't the rest of us be interested too?

Are white English speaking lives more valuable? Surely not.

Find a therapist listing now live

This is finally here! I've started sending out emails to people to let them know it's up. We've already had practitioners sign up from Australia, UK, USA and Portugal, and they cover quite a variety of therapies, although kinesiology is the most frequent, simply because I am in touch with more kinesiologists than other practitioners, but long term I hope it will be more balanced.

If you want to check it out, you can do so at http:://www.helathandgoodness.com or at http://www.mytherapypractice.com

Validating all the entries is going to take a long time. John worked out that if took me 30 seconds to validate each entry, it will take me 100 hours of work to get to the 10,000 entries I've set my heart on - of course, they won't all come in at once so it will take a while to happen.

In with validating entries I've posted two new articles on http://www.sportandme.com - one on improving your golf swing and the other about whether creatine builds muscles.

Now this afternoon it's back to putting more case studies on http://www.healthandgoodness.com

and I've got to find some time to get on my bike!

Happy News

I've talked in an earlier blog about looking for happy news to put on Health & Goodness (http://www.healthandgoodness.com) and now I've found a site called HappyNews - http://www.happynews.com - it's good to see such an upbeat site - do take a look.

We have our own happy news coming up hopefully later today - the birth of the therapist listing - it's been a big undertaking because I wanted it to international (it is) and cover lots of therapies (30+), be easy for people to use to find a chiropractor, kinesiologist, reflexologist or whatever (time will tell on ths one, but we think it is),and be easy for me to adminsiter.

I can't wait to see all those excellent therapists out there get another platform to promote themselves - I believe that http://www.healthandgoodness.com is a good place for this as there's a lot of good content on nutrition, exercise, weight and shape management, plus there's the therpay interviews and case studies. It's getting bigger and bigger by the day.

I'll let you know when the therpaist listing gets the green light.

Strengths & Our Environment

Sad news that the whale who had misguidedly travelled up the Thames has died.

It was interesting that the people trying to rescue him/her couldn't give it a sedative as it is a voluntary breather. This is idealwhen you're under water for a long time and need to hold your breath, but in this situation it was a liability as a sedative would have stopped or dimihsed its breathing.

That's true of so many situations when a strength in one cane become a weakness in another. We need to be able to stay true to ourselves, but also adapt to the environment that we find ourselves in.

West Nile Virus & HIV

Researchers have found that people who are naturally highly resistant to HIV are unusually prone to getting West Nile virus. 1% of population lacks a cell surface receptor called CCR5 which HIV uses as an open window to break into human immune system. If you have no CCR5 receptor, you are highly susceptible to West Nile virus (mosquito-borne and causes flu like symptoms that can be fatal). This has set me thinking about how genetic mutations can confer advantages as well as disadvantages, and I intend to write more fully on this topic for http://www.mytherapypractice.com

Reference for the research is http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/news/newsreleases/2006/ccr5.htm

hurray! hurray! hurray!

the revamped Health & Goodness http://www.healthandgoodness.com is finally up and I'm so delighted, but the work is only just beginning as I need to get a lot more case studies and symptoms information up, and shortly we'll be having the therpaist search up and I will need to check all that in.

I feel really tired - like you do after you achieve something - this idea started at the beginning of August .. hurray, this is a big step forward

Agriculture and chemicals

I had lunch with a friend who used to work for the UK ministry of agriculture, so she visited a lot of farms. She talked about the problem of chemicals. She said that on some farms fields will get sprayed twice if there isn't good communication between the owners/empoyees.

She said people worry about too many chemicals, but there can alsobe a problem with too little. Dairy farmers have to clean out the pipes with expensive chemicals, and some farmers won't use the recommended amount because of the cost - this can lead to unwanted bacteria being found in milk.


Makes you think ..

(By the way our website http://www.healthandgoodness.com is currently down because of the revamp - next week it will be up again and be even bigger and better)

Laughter is the best medicine

they say laughter is the best medicine and this made me laugh out loud this morning when I read it in the newspaper.

Ziggy is an African grey parrot who lives with Suzy Collins and its owner. One day as the couple were having a cuddle the parrot said "I love you Gary!" in an exact copy of Suzy's voice. When the parrot' owner saw her embarrassment he suspected she was seeing someone else as his name was Chris Taylor! She admitted it and they split up, but Chris also ended up getting rid of the parrot because it went on saying "I love you Gary"

Fair traded and orgnaic cotton

more chemcials are used in the production of cotton than any other crop in the world - according to the Soil Association about 150 gms - the equivalent of a cup of sugar - is used to grow the cotton for one T-shirt. This can't be good for the wearer or the producer or the environment.

Here's a site offering fair traded organic clothing http://www.equop.com. You can even vote for T-shirt designs or submit a design - 25% of profits go to the designer.

And don't forget our web site: http://www.healthandgoodness.com

Going out

I read in the paper this weekend that women spend an average of 2 years of their lives getting ready to go out!

Is this a waste of time, showing insecurity etc. on the part of women? Or is it that women are pampering themselves and taking care of themselves in this time?

Probabaly a bit of both, but 2 years does seem a lot of time - I can think of better things to do with two years ...

Immortality and rainy days

I really like this quote:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Life is so short

I've talked to two people recently who've set me thinking about how short life REALLY is - one lost his father on Christmas day - his father was 'fit as a fiddle' but was diagnosed as having cancer 3 weeks before Christmas and then died on Christmas day. The other was a man who's wife had been murdered - stabbed by a burgler.

Talking to these people brings home to me how short and fragile life is, and how we all need to get on with it and do the things we want and make peace with those we need to.

Body Mass Index

Here's a really neat online BMI calculator:

http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm

It lets you do calculations in Metric or Imperial measures and tells you what the results mean

Rules to live by

As part of the revamp of http://www.healthandgoodness.com I am putting case studies on it. Christine Nightingale of Toronto sent me an interesting case study and I dceided to look at her web site http://www.nightingalehealing.com. I looked at the section on Reiki and she has this:

"Dr. Usui rediscovered the laying on of hands which was practiced by Christ and Buddha. He formulated these principles of Reiki:

1. I will not be angry.
2. I will do my work joyfully.
3. I will be kind to my neighbour and every living thing.
4. I will give thanks for my many blessings.
5. I will not worry.

Reiki is not a religion, it is a way of life."

Sound principles.

More on new year's resolutions

I write a regular monthly column for The Cornsihman - a local newspaper in this part of the world, and I wrote a piece on new year's resolutions and persistence for them. I send my copy to a lady called Jackie. She sent me this comment back today:

"Apparently a baby falls at least 1500 whilst learning to walk, as adults we give up too easily."

Now that's an interesting thought - think of all those things that we would have never learnt as babies if we'd given up as easily as we do now!

new year's resolutions

Have you kept to your new year's resolutions? Sadly most of us haven't, and many of us have given up trying. But why is this? Are you going to wait another 12 months before you try again?
Thomas Edison said: "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." It is said that Edison was asked how he could bear to have so many failed experiments, and he said: “I’ve learnt 700 ways not to make a light bulb.” I’m not sure if this story is true, but it really shows graphically the power of positive persistence.

So, pick yourself up and try again, but before you do – think again. Think about the goal you’ve set yourself, and ask yourself some questions: Is it worth achieving? Is this the best way to achieve it? Do I need help from others to achieve my goal? Should I break a big goal down into several smaller goals? Have I set myself too many goals?

Then be persistent and tenacious. Louis Pasteur said: “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity".

Make 2006 a year when you got closer to the person you could be.

Web Sites nearly there

we are getting closer and closer to having everything in place for all the web sites. The main bit we are still waiting for is the free therpaist listing. This will go on http://healthandgoodness.com, and there will also be a link from the practitioner site http://www.mytherapypractice.com for therapists who want to sign up from there.

My aim is to make H & G the biggest resource on the net on alternative medicine for the general public - a big ambition for me, but an exciting and fulfilling one too.

I love this quote I read today:


The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. -- Winston Churchill