Dawnrachele’s Weblog

It’s kinda wierd having one foot in the alternative/natural boat and the other in the skeptic boat. I realize now that I was so emersed in the alternative world that I was no longer researching things and just believing that things labeled ‘natural’ were fact and safe and 100% perfect for my family. I truly believed that I belonged to that world and if I stepped back and started questioning too much, what does that mean about the type of person I am? It would mean that I’m questioning the type of person I have become and if I cracked that open, who was I?

I came to the conclusion that it was a silly way to live, and started questioning things. I mean, the reason I got into the alternative world in the first place was because I was questioning, right? So why did I stop? Why did I start walking blindly and only open my ears to things deemed ‘natural’.

So I’m kinda half alternative, and half skeptic. I’m fine with that now. At first I felt like my life was in turmoil and I had lost the natural, creative person I was (and was hoping to be). I’ve come to terms that both feet don’t need to be in only one boat and my beliefs don’t necessarily make me the person that I am. Beliefs change, and that is a part of life. Life is about learning and growing. When I stop learning I am dead.

I have never really believed in acupuncture myself, but it seems like everyone around me holds this practice really dear to them. I have heard so many different histories of acupuncture, its nice to see the truth for once.

Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth

by Harriet Hall, M.D.
By definition, “alternative” medicine is medicine that has not been scientifically proven and has not been accepted into mainstream scientific medicine. The question I keep hearing is, “But what about acupuncture? It’s been proven to work, it’s supported by lots of good research, more and more doctors are using it, and insurance companies even pay for it.” It’s time the acupuncture myth was punctured — preferably with an acupuncture needle. Almost everything you’ve heard about acupuncture is wrong.
To start with, this ancient Chinese treatment is not so ancient and may not even be Chinese! From studying the earliest documents, Chinese scholar Paul Unschuld suspects the idea may have originated with the Greek Hippocrates of Cos and later spread to China. It’s definitely not 3000 years old. The earliest Chinese medical texts, from the 3rd century BC, do not mention it. The earliest reference to “needling” is from 90 BC, but it refers to bloodletting and lancing abscesses with large needles or lancets. There is nothing in those documents to suggest anything like today’s acupuncture. We have the archaeological evidence of needles from that era — they are large; the technology for manufacturing thin steel needles appropriate for acupuncture didn’t exist until about 400 years ago.
The earliest accounts of Chinese medicine reached the West in the 13th century: they didn’t mention acupuncture at all. The first Westerner to write about acupuncture, Wilhelm Ten Rhijn, in 1680, didn’t describe acupuncture as we know it today: he didn’t mention specific points or “qi;” he spoke of large gold needles that were implanted deep into the skull or “womb” and left in place for 30 respirations.
Acupuncture was tried off and on in Europe after that. It was first tried in America in 1826 as a possible means of resuscitating drowned people. They couldn’t get it to work and “gave up in disgust.” I imagine sticking needles in soggy dead people was pretty disgusting.
Through the early 20th century, no Western account of acupuncture referred to acupuncture points: needles were simply inserted near the point of pain. Qi was originally vapor arising from food, and meridians were channels or vessels. A Frenchman, Georges Soulie de Morant, was the first to use the term “meridian” and to equate qi with energy — in 1939. Auricular (ear) acupuncture was invented by a Frenchman in 1957.
The Chinese government tried to ban acupuncture several times, from 1822 to the Chinese Nationalist government in World War II. Mao revived it in the “barefoot doctor” campaign in the 1960s as a cheap way of providing care to the masses; he did not use it himself and he did not believe it worked. It was Mao’s government that coined the term “traditional Chinese medicine” or TCM.
In 1972 James Reston accompanied Nixon to China and returned to tell about his appendectomy. It was widely believed that his appendix was removed under acupuncture anesthesia. In reality, acupuncture was used only as an adjunct for pain relief the day after surgery, and the relief was probably coincident with the expected return of normal bowel motility. A widely circulated picture of a patient allegedly undergoing open heart surgery with acupuncture anesthesia was shown to be bogus. If acupuncture is used in surgery today, it is used along with conventional anesthesia and/or pre-operative meds, and it is selected only for patients who believe in it and are likely to have a placebo response.
As acupuncture increased in popularity in the West, it declined in the East. In 1995, visiting American physicians were told only 15–20 percent of Chinese chose TCM, and it was usually used along with Western treatments after diagnosis by a Western-trained physician. Apparently some patients choose TCM because it is all they can afford: despite being a Communist country, China does not have universal health coverage.
There were originally 360 acupuncture points (based on the number of days of the year rather than on anatomy). Currently more than 2000 acupuncture points have been “discovered” leading one wag to comment that there was no skin left that was not an acupuncture point. There were either 9, 10, or 11 meridians — take your pick. Any number is as good as another, because no research has ever been able to document the existence of acupuncture points or meridians or qi.
Does acupuncture work? Which type of acupuncture? And what do you mean by “work”? There are various different Chinese systems, plus Japanese, Thai, Korean and Indian modalities, most of which have been invented over the last few decades: Whole body or limited to the scalp, hand, ear, foot, or cheek and chin; deep or superficial; with electrified needles; with dermal pad electrodes and no skin penetration.
Acupuncture works in the same manner that placebos work too. Acupuncture has been shown to “work” to relieve pain, nausea, and other subjective symptoms, but it has never been shown to alter the natural history or course of any disease. It’s mostly used for pain today, but the ancient Chinese maintained that it was not for the treatment of manifest disease, was so subtle that it should only be employed at the very beginning of a disease process, and was only likely to work if the patient believed it would work. Now there’s a bit of ancient wisdom!
Studies have shown that acupuncture releases natural opioid pain relievers in the brain: endorphins. Veterinarians have pointed out that loading a horse into a trailer or throwing a stick for a dog also releases endorphins. Probably hitting yourself on the thumb with a hammer would release endorphins too, and it would take your mind off your headache.
Psychologists can list plenty of other things that could explain the apparent response to acupuncture. Diverting attention from original symptoms to the sensation of needling, expectation, suggestion, mutual consensus and compliance demand, causality error, classic conditioning, reciprocal conditioning, operant conditioning, operator conditioning, reinforcement, group consensus, economic and emotional investment, social and political disaffection, social rewards for believing, variable course of disease, regression to the mean — there are many ways human psychology can fool us into thinking ineffective treatments are effective. Then there’s the fact that all placebos are not equal — an elaborate system involving lying down, relaxing, and spending time with a caring authority can be expected to produce a much greater placebo effect than simply taking a sugar pill.
There are plenty of studies showing that acupuncture works for subjective symptoms like pain and nausea. But there are several things that throw serious doubt on their findings. The results are inconsistent, with some studies finding an effect and others not. The higher quality studies are less likely to find an effect. Most of the studies are done by believers in acupuncture. Many subjects would not volunteer for an acupuncture trial unless they had a bias towards believing it might work. The acupuncture studies coming from China and other oriental countries are all positive — but then nearly everything coming out of China is positive. It’s not culturally acceptable to publish negative results because researchers would lose face and their jobs.
The biggest problem with acupuncture studies is finding an adequate placebo control. You’re sticking needles in people. People notice that. Double blinding is impossible: you might be able to fool patients into thinking you’ve used a needle when you haven’t, but there’s no way to blind the person doing the needling. Two kinds of controls have been used: comparing acupuncture points to non-points, and using an ingenious needle in a sheath that appears to have penetrated the skin when it hasn’t.
In George Ulett’s research, he found that applying an electrical current to the skin of the wrist — a kind of TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) treatment — worked just as well as inserting needles, and one point on the wrist worked for symptoms anywhere in the body.
Guess what? It doesn’t matter where you put the needle. It doesn’t matter whether you use a needle at all. In the best controlled studies, only one thing mattered: whether the patients believed they were getting acupuncture. If they believed they got the real thing, they got better pain relief — whether they actually got acupuncture or not! If they got acupuncture but believed they didn’t, it didn’t work. If they didn’t get it but believed they did, it did work.
A 2005 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the experiences of 302 people suffering from migraines who received either acupuncture, sham acupuncture (needles inserted at non-acupuncture points), or no acupuncture. During the study, the patients kept headache diaries. Subjects were “blind” to which experimental group they were in; the evaluators also did not know whose diary they were reading. Professional acupuncturists administered both the acupuncture and sham acupuncture treatments. Interestingly, although 51 percent of the acupuncture group showed a reduction in headache days by half (compared to 15 percent in the control group), but 53 percent of the sham acupuncture group had a 50 percent reduction in headache days!
Considering the inconsistent research results, the implausibility of qi and meridians, and the many questions that remain, it’s reasonable to conclude that acupuncture is nothing more than a recipe for an elaborate placebo seasoned with a soupcon of counter-irritant. You can play human pincushion if you want, and you might get a good placebo response, but there’s no evidence you’ll get anything more.
Note: Part of this article was adapted from a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the late Dr. Robert Imrie. It’s well worth a visit; it includes great pictures of camelpuncture, goatpuncture, and chickenpuncture.

http://www.comics.com/webmail/ViewStrip?key=62253339-8d17b34338

I am 12 weeks pregnant! I started feeling flutters about 5 days ago.

All outdoors,

all the time

Germany‘s ‘forest kindergartens’ grow in popularity with families who want their children to have a direct link with nature.

By Isabelle de Pommereau |

 Special to The Christian Science Monitor

FRANKFURT – All is quiet in the woods outside Frankfurt on this chilly spring morning until a group of 3- to 6-year-olds appears over the crest of a hill. Dressed in rain gear with small backpacks and rolled trail mats, they leap over fallen trees and narrow streams and puddles while two caretakers haul a small cart of tools and supplies.

Outside the city, the Forest Mice from St. Thomas Kindergarten are on their way to school, al fresco. This is one of roughly 300 such “forest kindergartens” in Germany today – a trend that is growing quickly. In an age when concerns about obesity, poor concentration, and aggressive behavior run high, many German parents are eschewing computer screens and plastic toys in favor of outdoor education.

While most kindergartners play in heated classrooms and courtyards with slides and swings, the Forest Mice romp in the open air every day of the school year, rain or shine (there is a trailer for extreme weather conditions).

“Parents are more and more aware that consumerism and high technology do not necessarily provide advantages,” says Marie Louise Sander, president of the National Association of Forest Kindergartens in Flensburg, home to the first German forest kindergarten, which started in 1993.

“Parents feel instinctively that their children need … more than a perfect playroom. They need to develop outside the artificially created environment of doll houses and drawing tables,” she says.

Unlike many European countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Germany has no national standards for kindergarten, which includes children ages 3 to 7. Here, ages are mixed, so that 3-year-olds and 6-year-olds play together.

German kindergarten isn’t mandatory – children start school at age 7 – but, by law, every child is entitled to a slot regardless of income. Kindergartens are public or private initiatives subsidized by municipal and regional governments. Most children participate.

For St. Thomas students, kindergarten starts at the subway station in Frankfurt at 8:15 a.m. The children meet for a 20-minute ride to the forest, where they will spend the next four hours. (Caretakers are reachable via mobile phones.)

Children hike from the subway to their breakfast area, asking questions along the way. The rules, which include staying within earshot, not picking flowers, and not touching animals, are strictly enforced.

“Look, here’s a beetle!” exclaims caretaker Natacha Lautenschläger. She stops abruptly, crawls on the ground, and swiftly pulls out a guidebook as a herd of curious kindergartners gathers around her.

Breakfast, preceded by sharing time, takes place in a clearing, on wooden benches the children have built themselves. Melina has water duty, and holds a bottle so her classmates can wash up. The weather turns cold and Paul, the group’s smallest “mouse” at age 3, starts screaming. “Shhh!” says Ute Constant, another caretaker. “You’re scaring the little caterpillars!”

Playtime comes next, and children scatter into several groups. The emphasis is on imagination and communication, using nature’s supplies for props. Tobias is a soldier; Charlotte a knight. Anne Katherine takes the role of the knight’s horse. Each corner of the clearing becomes a learning platform.

“A playground doesn’t change,” says Ms. Lautenschläger. “A slide remains a slide. But nature evolves and lives. When it rains, there’s a small brook to run over; when it snows they can slide. They experience the year’s cycles. They can touch and comprehend nature.”

Forest kindergartens’ greatest contribution is that they instill in kids “an unlimited range of questioning possibilities,” says Gerd Schäfer, an expert on preschool education at the University of Cologne. “In an indoor classroom … the questions kids ask are often those that adults want them to ask, those that link the things in their classrooms.” In the woods, he adds, “the likelihood of asking ‘What is this?’ and ‘Where does this come from?’ becomes much greater.”

Generations ago, children experienced the environment firsthand. Today, they are often driven from one event to the next – from what Roland Gorges, professor of early education at the University of Darmstadt, calls “islands.” The links between the islands have become lost in the process. Forest kindergartens give kids the chance to explore with all their senses.

Mr. Gorges says this includes playing in a brook, letting water run down your palms, or floating paper boats on it; smelling flowers; climbing trees.

Forest kindergartens first appeared in Denmark in the 1950s when a Danish mother began taking her friends’ children, along with her own, to the woods every day. In the 1990s, Petra Jaegger, a young kindergarten teacher in northern Germany, sought an alternative kindergarten concept. She traveled to Denmark and what she saw convinced her. “A forest kindergarten,” Ms. Jaegger says, “means giving kids the chance to remain a child.”

Today, Forest Mice are scurrying about in Austria and Japan as well.

After 10 years of experience with forest kindergartens, Germany is producing its first studies. Among the results: The Forest Mice have fewer difficulties sitting still and concentrating than their classroom counterparts. They are less aggressive and report fewer illnesses than other children.

“Parents notice that their children simply feel good,” Gorges says. “There’s a balance between spirit and body; they have a special sensitivity to nature.”

Martina von Winter says that the absence of manufactured toys has fostered her daughter Friederike’s imagination and made her a well-rounded child. Sabina Koliqi says the forest kindergarten has changed her daughter Fiona. “She’s a balanced person now. There are no goals to fulfill. She can find her inner peace and just be herself.”

Concerns that children who spend much of their day in the woods might lack social skills haven’t come to pass. “It’s demanding,” says Marie Sander. “Forest kindergarten means being able to do things that aren’t always comfortable.”

The lack of mandatory curriculums at the kindergarten level, coupled with a long tradition of encouraging alternative educational concepts, such as the Montessori or Waldorf school philosophies, and Germany’s special romantic relationship with the woods, help explain the success of forest kindergartens, says Professor Schäfer. He doubts, however, that forest kindergartens will become mainstream in Germany. Sending every child to the woods is a nice – but elitist – idea, he says. “One can’t live only in the woods.”

But the influence of the forest-kindergarten movement is being felt on other kindergartens across the country. Preschools are borrowing the concept, introducing “forest days” or “forest weeks” into their curriculums.

Whatever school experiences the Forest Mice have in the future, it’s likely they will continue to have a unique attachment to the outdoors.

I really liked this movie, but until reading this hadn’t thought of the hypocritical practices Disney has taken with the merchandise/commercialism of this movie.

Trashing Wall-E
By Josh Golin

Wall-E, Disney’s smash hit about the last remaining trash-compacting robot on an abandoned and pollution-saturated Earth, has inspired a lot of adult conversations for a kids’ movie. Progressives love its prescient ecological message and its critique of expanding corporate influence. Some conservatives decry its “fear mongering” and “leftist propaganda”. Others see the film as a cautionary tale about big government run amok.

If Wall-E were only a movie, I’d put myself squarely in the first camp. As an anti-commercialism activist, I cheered Wall-E‘s explicit linking of corporate marketing, consumption, and environmental degradation. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the film is both visually stunning and genuinely moving. Or that, as a fan of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, I was enthralled by the film’s audaciously silent opening sequence.

But Wall-E isn’t merely a film. Like nearly all media produced for kids these days, it’s also a brand. There are dozens of Wall-E action figures and electronic toys, as well as video games for eight different systems. There are Wall-E backpacks, lunch bags, clothing, sheets, baking tins, dinnerware, plastic cups, invitations, thank-you notes, piñatas, and tattoos. There are already 28 Wall-E books. Adults can debate the movie’s meaning all they want, but for kids the takeaway message of the entire Wall-E experience is buy, buy, buy.

It’s incredibly hypocritical for Disney to simultaneously profit from a film about a world overrun by garbage and from the toys and merchandise that will fill tomorrow’s trash. It’s sad to think of those Wall-E action figures (Collect them all!) stuck in landfills long after the film has left theaters, with any associated positive messages forgotten. It’s hard not to envision a moment in the future where Wall-E stumbles into small mountains of his own branded merchandise.

Those who celebrate Wall-E’s green message can only do so by turning a blind eye to the impact of the Wall-E brand in the real world. That means not only overlooking all that Wall-E stuff, but that one of the film’s corporate partners is BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies. Visitors to the Wall-E website (another part of the Wall-E experience that resides outside the theater) can click through to BP’s special website for kids, where they transfer their warm feelings about the movie and any messages they’ve internalized about saving the earth to BP.

As adults, we may be able to separate media texts from their attendant commercialism. But that’s not how kids experience media programs and characters. In children’s increasingly commercialized and media-saturated worlds, Shrek is Shrek—whether he’s on-screen charmingly teaching lessons about inner beauty or on a cereal box hawking sugar and calories. Marketers understand this; that is why they are so eager to use popular characters to sell kids on almost anything. Ads for kids’ films and their licensed products run continually on children’s television, reinforcing each other and promoting the idea that the way to express love for a character is to own it in as many forms as possible.

That is a particularly frightening idea. The commercial pressures on kids continue to increase. If we are to have any hope of reversing the consumer-driven destruction of our planet, we need to teach young children—the targets of all the Wall-E merchandise marketing—that play and love do not equal consumption.

Josh Golin is the Associate Director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston.

Born at 3:29pm on September 27. Weighing in at 2.8kg or 6lbs 5ounces.

Subject: Role models

It is American based, but still applies here in Canada.

Lest we forget this too….

THIS IS MOVING. HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET, IF WE EVER KNEW,

WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE.

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.

Remember, it was not until 1920

That women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed
Nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking
For the vote.

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing
Went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

(Lucy Burns)
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above
Her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping
For air.

(Dora Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her
Head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,
Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging,
Beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917,
When the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
Guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
They dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right
To vote.
For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their
Food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms.

(Alice Paul)
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
Until word was smuggled out to the press.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because-
-why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work?
Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s new
Movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle
These women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling
Booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
Actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history,
Saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk
About it, she looked angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought
Kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,’ she said.
‘What would those women think of the way I use, or don’t use,
My right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just
Younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The
Right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history,
Social studies and government teachers would include the movie in
Their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere
Else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing,
But we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think
A little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.

We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so
Hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party – remember to vote.

History is being made.

So I

 I’m actually 6.5 weeks in this picture, but I still look pretty much the same size.

 http://www.i-am-pregnant.com/Pregnancy/calendar/week/10

Almost 2 inches long! Small plum size.

Keep in mind this isn

 Keep in mind, this isn’t MY actual baby.