Taken from a forum post and republished here: So, I’ve been mulling this thing for over a week now, wondering how to go about expressing my gratitude to the man I married almost 13 years ago. I decided to do it here because: A) It’s my forum and I can and B) Most of the [...]

(No, unfortunately it’s not for Kira. This came through in my email this morning, so I thought I’d pass it on.) May 3, 2007 Good News Travels Fast! Your [tag]activism[/tag] just saved supplements from being turned into “untested drugs”! [tag]Big Pharma[/tag] will be back, but today, we can do a victory dance! Thank you 435,005 [...]

This article on the [tag]FDA[/tag]‘s attempts to end access to [tag]vitamins[Tag], [tag]minerals[Tag], [tag]herbs[tag], and other supplements came to me in email today. I’m passing it on here in hopes the wider outreach will spur those of you who use alternative healing modalities into action to protect what’s left of your rights to do so. Comments [...]

What every person ought to know before they become hospitalized. I’ve noticed that since I wrote the last installment I’ve felt like writing again, and about more than what happened to my son and my family this past summer. I’m getting ideas and concepts about projects I want to tackle that don’t involve my home. [...]

“Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though [...]

Hospitals advocate the use of narcotics for pain management with an unconscious zeal, and very carefully refuse to look at the long-term consequences for patients and their families. “We do not properly appreciate the absence of pain.” That is a quote from a book I read a long time ago, when I wasn’t much older [...]

If the choice is between Prozac and a movie, I’d choose the movie. It turns out, insurance companies will make a different choice. The dateline for this is early July, 2005. We were losing him, and not to staph. He’d fought his way back from that hideous allergic reaction, his blood cultures were MRSA negative. [...]

A long hospitalization is a crucible, an experience which burns away all that is unnecessary. What it leaves behind is essential, and luminous. I can hear his portable VAC unit chirping in the next room. I suppose “chirping” is a euphemism; those disposed to more sophomoric senses of humor (his included) have a different word [...]

Apparently, the mystery isn’t in the beautiful complexity of the human body, but rather that there is a whole body to be treated. The moment I understood it was just that serious was when they told me part of his lung had collapsed, and that they didn’t know why. He’d been in the hospital a [...]

(On coincidence, modern medicine, modern media, and Michael Moore.) I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s no such thing as coincindence. I logged into Alternet.org today (they’re my homepage, though they’re not carrying Molly Ivins these days and I’m not happy about it) and was therefore completely unsurprised to find a well-known filmmaker [...]