Tag Archives: healing

Thinking Outside The Box When It Comes To Healing

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Thinking Outside The Box When It Comes To Healing

Many of us don’t realize how much of a role environment, emotional state and spirituality play in our current health status. Understanding these connections can be especially helpful during the peak of cold and flu season. To fully grasp this “cause-and-effect,” it’s a good idea to have a larger perspective on the following contributing factors to illness.

Emotions

The late psychologist Abraham Maslow, Ph. D., said that aside from basic survival and safety needs, we possess an innate drive to belong, develop self-esteem and actualize our authentic selves. While it might seem that exposure to more people is an invitation for illness, a study found the exact opposite: According to the researchers, people with one to three social “roles,” such as a parent, child and friend, are more than four times as likely to get sick than those with six or more social roles.

This may stem from the relationship between your immune system and the self-esteem you get from your interactions with others. The more positive social interactions you experience, the greater your self-esteem and the more you enhance your immune system’s functions.

Spirituality

Spirituality can be broadly defined as the things you hold important and sacred, and the relationships you form with others and with the world around you. Boundary setting is one of the most important aspects of spirituality; it is especially important if you want to create a meaningful and fulfilling life.

The boundaries you set are codes of conduct relating to how you behave toward yourselves and others. For instance, how you eat, work, exercise, and live all reflect your individual boundaries. All of these actions have a profound effect on your health and sense of well-being.

Environment

Your body actually has two distinct environments that interact with one another: the internal, and the external. This is something you should always be mindful of. In the external environment there are sources of noise, stress, toxicity, temperature and mood affecting weather, and volumes of work or exertion to complete. All of these things affect your health directly by influencing the nervous system and your immune systems.

Internally, your body’s chemical environment has a large bearing on weather germs are allowed or prevented from inhabiting your bloodstream. This makes it important to consider the ways your internal environment is manipulated by the foods you select, your sleep cycles, and the kinds of thoughts you allows to take up residence in your mind. Both positive and negative ideas can have a big influence on your choices and behaviors each day.

When all is said and done, illness can be caused by a wealth of seemingly insignificant factors that affect the whole person. Various strains of colds and viruses have different dimensions. This is because humans are also multidimensional. Recognizing this fosters the understanding and application of emotional, spiritual, and environmental cause and effects of sickness. This comprehension and practice allows you to prevent colds and flus from affecting you.

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Our Pets Improve Our Health

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While it may be difficult to get Americans to collectively agree on the many issues, it seems that when it comes to pets and the value we place on them, there is little disagreement. The 2015-2016 American Pet Products Association survey reported that an astounding 65% of all American households have a pet. An identified 79.7 households have dogs–over 100 million of them in all. Cat owner households total 42.9 million. Fresh water fish, birds, reptiles and horses, along with small animals such as rabbits, hamsters, and others make up another 25-27 million pets.

Americans, it seems, have also come to view and treat their pets in human terms. No longer satisfied with relegating the family pet to its own domain, today’s pet lovers are demanding the highest quality products and services for those they love. The idea of buying a simple dog chew or catnip toy now takes a back seat to designer sweaters and jewelry for our beloved companions. The current trend of dog hotels instead of kennels, indoor animal toilets, perfume, a hugely popular service “doggie dates” and exotic animal sitting services have found their way into today’s pet economy.

For the most passionate pet lover, faux mink coats, lumberjack vests, designer jackets, matching jeweled leather collar and leash sets, Halloween costumes, and holiday outfits are becoming part of the new “pet fashion.” Safety seats for transporting pets in vehicles are also becoming popular. One of the larger pet expenditures is pet food. These days the pet food aisle looks strikingly similar to the rest of the “human food” aisles in chain grocery stores. Specialized, balanced gourmet meals are readily available in the refrigerator section as well as a plethora of animal treats, vitamins, and supplements. Special diet foods for the senior pet population offer life extension and prolonged health.

The country’s household expenditures on pets for 2015-16 was in excess of 62.75 billion dollars. It is easy to imagine that this number must be a mistake as this is more money being spent on pets in the United State than the gross national product numbers for all but 64 countries around the world. This 62.75 billion dollar figure also represents almost double the approximately $35 billion dollars Americans spend on going to movies, playing video games, or for listening to recorded music.

The approximate 20% of non-pet households are for the most part made up of individuals with allergies, or who live in apartments or other environments that do not welcome pets, and those who have no time left in their over-scheduled lives to care for a pet. It seems people of all ages, ranging from infants to very elderly, enjoy and welcome the company of pets. The presence of pets is so popular today that some nursing facilities now have therapy pets at the facility on a regular basis. The one down side to this practice is that sometimes the residents start arguing and competing over who gets to keep the cat, dog, or bird with them for the day.

What fuels our passion for pets? It is really quite simple. Our pets love us unconditionally. They listen to us when we speak, provide companionship without politics or the agenda of most relationships. They accept our love and affection the way we chose to give it, without complaint, and they provide us in return with affection and loyalty. They are the ultimate loving family member, and we are now treating them as such. Can anyone blame us?

Social networking has become the way we communicate and “do” relationships. These days it is often over e-mail and texting messages that we are starting relationships or ending them, sharing major life events–even proposing marriage. The intimate contact of human connections we had even 15 years ago before the dominance of the internet and cell phones is now being replaced by our pets.

Pets are not only beloved companions, but they are also taking on the role of healers. Dogs have been long known for their service as seeing eye dogs, but the use of dogs and other pets in many areas of healing and health monitoring are becoming more widespread. Dogs who alert their companions for seizures or “sniff out” cancer or horses that assist with helping autistic children to interact with others are easily found on the news or internet.

A recent study by researcher Dr. Karen Allen at the State University of New York at Buffalo identified that individuals suffering from hypertension when adopting a dog or cat had lower blood pressure readings in stressful situations than their counterparts who did not have a pet companion. The National Institute of Technology Assessment Workshop, Health Benefits of Pets, identified that pets provide greater psychological stability, which us protects not only from heart disease and other stress related conditions but also reduces depression. In the same study, pets have been shown to lower the cost of health care as individuals with pets make fewer doctor visits, especially “for non-serious medical conditions.”

A Perdue University study demonstrated that when seniors face traumas or other forms of adversity, the affection received by their pets and the bond between them helps prevent depress and loneliness. As a means of enhancing our psychological and physical well-being, pets have the power to love us, heal us, and help us to live longer. If only we could get other humans to do so with the same honesty and loyalty that our pet companions provide us.

Sources:

For more whole health discussions, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama. Also available on iHeartRadio.

What We Believe Becomes Our Reality II

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Given the way the health sciences have been taught in nursing and medical schools, it is perfectly understandable for physicians and nurses trained more than 25 years ago to think the placebo effect didn’t make sense and was instead a popular explanation for a sudden healing – a “spontaneous remission.” It is a leap for many to accept that a person could think or believe something and that simple act of belief could heal them.

Up until the last twenty or so years, research scientists did not have a grasp on how the brain and our emotions worked to create our reality. The subject of emotions has been and still is very much “uncharted waters” in behavioral science. However, what is well documented today is how the various brain waves function and what part of the brain each of the various brain waves control and stimulate and, most importantly, what emotions actually are.

The “beta waves” are the brain waves that allow us to focus on the words on this blog and comprehend, in the moment, what is intellectually being communicated. These waves are produced in the frontal lobe which is the seat of intellectual functioning. Thinking, analyzing, reasoning, and so forth occur in this part of the brain.

The “alpha waves,” which are the slower brain waves, originate in the mid-brain are the brain waves that allow us access to our unconscious thinking or what some refer to as the soul. All thought processes, be it from the beta wave or alpha wave region of the brain, are actually chemical reactions that produce specific proteins that communicate with our immune cell membranes and other cell membranes of our body.

The specific thoughts we think and the region of the brain they originate in have an identifiable chemistry that has been shown to create dramatic changes in our physical bodies. In Dr Paul Pearsall’s groundbreaking book “The Hearts Code” he tells many amazing mind/body stories but one, in particular, that is a striking example of how powerful thoughts and images are, is the story he tells about a schizophrenic patient who demonstrated completely different disease states depending on the personality she was exhibiting. Ultrasounds, cat-scans, lab tests all confirmed that one of her personalities had a massive cancerous tumor and yet when she went into a different personality state all of her previous pathology disappeared as well.

Our brains are the ultimate manifesters of matter. The chair you are sitting on was a thought before it became that chair. Thoughts ARE “things” – thoughts in action are what manifest reality. For the woman who was cured of her stiffness after the sham surgery, her mind manifested a different set of thoughts through her hope and expectations for the outcome of the surgery. Her brain waves and proteins created positive chemistry which communicated with her immune system through its cell membranes. The results – she became healthier and could “stride across the room”

The idea of mind over matter is a powerful one. This science, and our understanding of its amazing chemistry, is in its infancy stage. In the future, we will take the possibility of healing ourselves with thought and imagery for granted just as we now do about people having an organ transplant – which was thought unheard of not that long ago.

In the meantime, we can all improve our health, success, and happiness but learning to improve our “self-speak” and reinforce our bodies and minds with positive words, thoughts, and images.

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Holding In Our Emotions Can Lead To Illness

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The way we feel — especially when we feel hurt or angry — can cause negative effects in the body due to the neurological and neurochemical connections between body and mind. If we internalize anger, our nervous and hormone systems react, creating neurotransmitter chemicals that can lead to harmful side effects. This can compromise our health as well as our personal and professional relationships. In short, holding in our emotions can lead to illness as well as unhappiness.

Angry Consequences 

Anger that is felt over a period of time is unhealthy. When we become angry and do not express ourselves in a productive manner, the body reacts through the stress adaptation response. This includes biochemical physical responses that can lead to illness or death. If we are habitually angry, the conditions that can occur as a result of this physical response to the chronic or ongoing anger include:

–Asthma
-Elevated blood pressure
-Glaucoma
-Heart attack
-Hiatus hernia
-Hives
-Increased heart rate
-Low back pain
-Migraines
-Psoriasis
-Shortened life expectancy
-Stroke
-Tense muscles
-Ulcers

In addition to thousands of anger and stress studies, many other health studies have connected anger to loneliness, chronic anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sleep disorders, obsessive-compulsive behavior and phobias. It can also have a detrimental effect on our relationships and threaten the development and maintenance of intimate relationships. Communication is the key to learning how to handle our anger and creating healthy and fulfilling relationships.

Better Communication Skills For Better Health

Learning how to communicate does not have to be complicated. While most of us have developed communication skills from our families and environment, there are easy-to-learn, proven skills that can provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to be able to channel and express your anger or hurt feelings appropriately.

When we are able to express our feelings (be they sadness, frustration or anger), we feel more in control of our lives. We are able to create the type of relationships we want to experience with others.

Current whole health research has clearly shown that it is healthier to express and resolve our relationship issues than it is to hold them in and allow them either to make us ill or to cause conflicts at work, home or with friends and colleagues.

Join the conversation.

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Aloe Vera – a Star of Holistic Healing

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In the field of holistic medicine and Whole Health Care aloe vera is rightly famed for its impressive skin healing properties, as many of us who’ve suffered sun burns can attest! This wonder plant has proven to be one of the most versatile remedies found in Nature’s pharmacy. Derived from the leaves of the succulent perennial Aloe barbadensis miller – one of 420 species that make up the genus Aloe – the vitamin and mineral rich gel is applied for a wide array of medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic purposes. Aloe vera has even been tested by the United States government as a potential treatment for radiation burns in the event of nuclear warfare. Let’s take a closer look at aloe’s amazing attributes, and how it can help in achieving greater holistic health.

Aloe comes in two forms: gel, the most used variant, is extracted from the inner part of the leaf while aloe latex, which can be ingested orally, is taken from under the plant’s kin. As mentioned above aloe has a trove of vitamins and minerals, with up to 75 potentially active components being identified, all vital for insuring proper functioning of all the major body systems. Among them are Vitamins A, C, E, and B12, all 8 essential amino acids, minerals such as calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, as well as the anti-inflammatory hormones called auxins and gibberellins which aid in wound healing. It also provides 4 anti-inflammatory essential fatty acids, including cholesterol. All of these components contribute to aloe’s renowned skin treating capabilities; on record as far back as Ancient Egypt (the queens Nefertiti and Cleopatra utilized it for cosmetic purposes). It is highly esteemed in both Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, two of the oldest systems of practice in the world. In 1820 Aloe was formally listed by American pharmacopeias, before being clinically tested in the 1930s in the treatment of radiotherapy burns.   In addition to its time tested role in treating burns, its antiseptic properties have proven beneficial for conditions like psoriasis, dermatitis, herpes, and cold sores, as well for wound treatment.

Aloe’s antibacterial elements also make it a good treatment option for dry scalp and dandruff, helping to eliminate dead skin cells and insure healthy skin growth on the scalp. It has also been shown to treat constipation, due to its high content of anthraquinones, compounds that act as natural laxatives. Coupled with its strong anti-inflammatory agents, Aloe’s laxative properties make it a potential treatment for digestive problems, helping to balance acid/alkaline levels, stimulate digestive bacteria, heal stomach ulcers, and normalize bowel function. A study published in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences suggests Aloe could potentially be used to aid in alleviating symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): 33 patients who were instructed to drink 30 milliliters of aloe juice twice a day reported noticeable improvement in their IBS related pain, as well as a reduction in their flatulence levels.

Enzyme laden aloe can help maintain optimal cell health, transmuting proteins into amino acids and enzymes into energy utilized by cells. Its high zinc content also contributes to maximum immune function helping to combat disease, promote immune enhancing hormone receptors, and destroy harmful bacteria. As mentioned previously aloe’s high vitamin and mineral levels can assist in lowering inflammation, the underlying “silent killer” behind many of today’s medical conditions. Its rich antioxidant properties help to reduce damage by free radicals, maintain cell health, and shield the skin from cancer inducing damage from UV rays. Some interesting evidence seems to indicate that aloe can be a potential remedy for diabetes, as it appears to positively influence chronic hypoglycemia.

While no major side effects have been reported for topical use of Aloe gel, taking large amounts of Aloe latex orally can be potentially hazardous. Symptoms can include diarrhea, abdominal cramping, loss of vision, muscle weakness, and nausea. Doses of 1 gram per day or more can lead to kidney damage and stomach ulcers. Women who are pregnant or nursing are advised not to take aloe orally, as it may generate a miscarriage or premature birth. It can also lead to problems if ingested by children under 12 such as cramping, nausea, and diarrhea. People diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, colitis, and other intestinal disorders should also avoid it, as it is a powerful bowel irritant.

When it comes to selecting aloe, not all products are created equal. Mass commercial practices of grinding, crushing, pressing, and filtration of aloe extracts can remove most of not all of the active properties. To get the greatest bang for your buck be sure to verify the product labels carefully, and look for the International Aloe Science Council certification mark. And, as with all dietary and herbal supplements, consult your healthcare provider before incorporating aloe vera into your self-care and Whole Health regime.

For more whole health discussions, visit Living Above The Drama and tune in to Dr. Georgianna Donadio's hit show on iHeartRadio.

Being Thankful Heals The Heart

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giving thanks heals the heart

What a wonderful gift Thanksgiving, a day for giving and expressing thanks, is for all of us. Anyone and everyone can participate in this day of gathering family and friends to share food and well wishes, taking time to reflect on the things we have been blessed with and are thankful for. This giving thanks heals the heart.

Giving thanks is a healing and healthy act that many of us have sadly reserved for this one special time of the year. Ignatius, the renowned scholar and saint, offers us a powerful insight into the nature of why we suffer – and as it happens, it relates to giving thanks.

Ignatius said that “all suffering starts with ingratitude.” When we lose our appreciation for all that we have and the many blessings each of our lives is bestowed with, we begin to seek, want and covet what others have been blessed with. We put our own gifts aside, much like children do when they see their friend’s or sibling’s shiny new toy.

This gratitude opens the heart and removes “stress” that comes from fear of not having:

– Everything that we want

– Everything that we think we need

– What we see others have

– What we think is due us

– What we believe will make us happy

– What we believe will make us important or loved

Giving thanks for what we have, rather than wanting and longing for things we do not have, is a simple act of love that fills us with the humble pleasure of realizing how the universe cares for us – and is taking care of us.

Even when things are difficult and we are suffering, when we take the time to reflect on all the good things we also have in our lives, we suffer less, worry less and feel happier. This can stimulate real, holistic healing—the cornerstone of whole health. The spirit is healed when we release the resentments we carry. The body is healed when stress is reduced, stress that puts strain on the heart.

Perhaps Ignatius is on to something very holistic when he encourages us to remember the biblical wisdom found in I Thessalonians 5: 18 that recommends to us – “in all things give thanks.” For in this we will find our hearts full and our fears dissolved.

Happy Thanksgiving Holiday Season.

With all good wishes,

Georgianna

 

FREE Whole Health Consultations available.
888-354-4325 Take charge of your health!