“
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
“
Stay positive, all other choices are pointless punishments to your psyche.
”
”
Joe Peterson (Help Me Live... As I Die, Cancer vs. the Power of Love)
“
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
“
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
We are left wondering why we are having good days, why we are surviving. It is curious that survivor's guilt could befall a cancer patient.
”
”
Lynda Wolters (Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need)
“
oh.
she heard it
too-no waters
coursing, canyon
empty, sun
soundless-
and the beast
your life
nowhere
hiding (p. 103)
”
”
Barbara Blatner (The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death)
“
Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (To Have and Have Not)
“
...gripping the
rim of the sink
you claw your
way to stand
and cling there,
quaking with
will, on
heron legs,
and still the hot
muck pours
out of you. (p. 27)
”
”
Barbara Blatner (The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death)
“
I always try to stay positive, but right now I just want to scream and cry a little. I have an amazing support system here, but sometimes I feel like I can't cry or be mad because they think I'm not being positive.
”
”
Lynda Wolters (Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need)
“
Good things can come from thinking about and facing your death. It's about understanding life.
”
”
Lynda Wolters (Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need)
“
I am grateful for everything and every day, and that is no longer just words I feed myself from Post-it notes stuck to my mirror as positive affirmations.
”
”
Lynda Wolters (Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need)
“
Honesty is the best approach - and some understanding of how cancer patients see their illness can help. Cliched terms and thoughtless positives don't work, such as, 'You look good, though.' 'At least you got the good cancer.' 'Be strong.' 'You got this.' 'This is just a season.
”
”
Lynda Wolters (Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need)
“
I think timing is better left up to God to decide then religious leaders. I once met a man that brought his wife flowers in the hospital. They held hands, kissed and were as affectionate as any cute couple could be. They were both in their eighties. I asked them how long they were married. I expected them to tell me fifty years or longer. To my surprise, they said only five years. He then began to explain to me that he was married thirty years to someone that didn’t love him, and then he remarried a second time only to have his second wife die of cancer, two years later. I looked at my patient (his wife) sitting in the wheelchair next to him smiling. She added that she had been widowed two times. Both of her marriages lasted fifteen years. I was curious, so I asked them why they would even bother pursuing love again at their age. He looked at me with astonishment and said, “Do you really think that you stop looking for a soulmate at our age? Do you honestly believe that God would stop caring about how much I needed it still, just because I am nearing the end of my life? No, he left the best for last. I have lived through hell, but if I only get five years of happiness with this woman then it was worth the years of struggle I have been through.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!
”
”
Tanya Masse
“
it’s “important to have a really good, positive attitude for every moment of your life even if you don’t see a reason for doing it in the first place.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
All things that we perceive as positive, negative, good, or bad are simply parts of the perfect, balanced Whole.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
blue-gold sky, fresh cloud,
emerald-black mountain, trees
on rocky ledges,
on the summit, the tiny pin
of a telephone tower-all
brilliantly clear,
in shadow and out.
and on and through
everything
everywhere
the sun shines
without reservation (p. 97)
”
”
Barbara Blatner (The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death)
“
Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief.
If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.
”
”
Judy Cornish (The Dementia Handbook: How to Provide Dementia Care at Home)
“
She could have asked me to do anything, and no matter how heinous, I would have complied. Slaughter a kindergartener? Sure. Scam cancer patients? No problem. Leave a positive review of the new Star Wars movies saying they were better than the originals? I would have smiled while typing. It was sickening.
”
”
Benjamin Kerei (Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer (Unorthodox Farming, #1))
“
once ruffle-skirted
vanity table where I primped
at thirteen, opening
drawers to a private
chaos of eyeshadows
lavender teal sky-blue,
swarms of hair pins
pony tail fasteners,
stashes of powders,
colonies of tiny
lipsticks (p.39)
”
”
Barbara Blatner (The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death)
“
Hope is one of our central emotions, but we are often at a loss when asked to define it. Many of us confuse hope with optimism, a prevailing attitude that "things turn out for the best." But hope differs from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to "Think Positively," or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality. Although there is no uniform definition of hope, I found on that seemed to capture what my patients had taught me. Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind's eye- a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no room for delusion.
”
”
Jerome Groopman (The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness)
“
Therefore, he concluded, it’s “important to have a really good, positive attitude for every moment of your life even if you don’t see a reason for doing it in the first place.” I couldn’t help but smile.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
What I mean by being “centered” is experiencing being at the center of my cosmic web, being aware of my position. This is really the only place any of us ever are, and it’s important to feel our centrality at the core of it.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
Your health, your experiences, and your life do not have to be at the mercy of your negative emotions. When you consciously choose to focus on a thought or belief that is positive, comforting, or hopeful, you’re clearing out that emotional clutter that’s weighing you down. You’re energetically shifting yourself to a better place.
”
”
Susan Barbara Apollon (An Inside Job)
“
when I say, “creating a positive reality,” I don’t mean simply being optimistic. I also don’t mean adopting some sort of deluded view of the world in which simply wishing for wealth will suddenly result in a windfall of millions, or simply envisioning your cancer disappearing will cure you forever. This is neither positive nor productive.
”
”
Shawn Achor (Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change)
“
Mammograms are in fact fuzzy things. Reading them accurately is a challenging task—much more challenging than even many medical professionals realize. As Timothy J. Jorgensen has noted, when 160 gynecologists were asked to assess the likelihood of a fifty-year-old woman having breast cancer if her mammogram was positive, 60 percent of them thought the chances were 8 or 9 out of 10. “The truth is that the odds the woman actually has cancer are only 1 in 10,” writes Jorgensen. Remarkably, radiologists do little better.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Because I believe that some good can come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, "So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple?" My response? A lot of people have positive, life-changing experiences that come along with terminal illness. But I would not recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.
”
”
Esther Perel (The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity)
“
Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?"
"So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!"
"And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!"
"Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?"
"Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!"
The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (Freedom)
“
If you are a white male, you don't deserve to live. You are a cancer, you're a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world!
”
”
Noel Ignatiev
“
Entertain only those thoughts which bring health, vitality and happiness in your life. Start now and think right for you are the painter of the canvas of your life.
”
”
Sanchita Pandey (Cancer to Cure)
“
The only real issue with these people, besides the occasional hygiene challenge, was that they always seemed to embrace failure as a positive outcome. “I have not failed,” they’d endlessly quote Edison, “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Which may be an acceptable thing to say in science but is absolutely the wrong thing to say to a roomful of investors looking for an immediate, high-ticket, chronic treatment for cancer. God save them from actual cures. Much harder to make money off someone who doesn’t have a problem anymore.
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
When worship expresses only “victory,” it can unintentionally suggest that the broken and the lonely and the hurting have no place here. The message can be, “If you want to fit in, first get your emotions in order so that you can be positive, and then go to worship.” But the Psalms help show us that bottling up or trying to “fix” those emotions ourselves is not the right way.
”
”
J. Todd Billings (Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ)
“
A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
Those are pretty telling numbers. Those results are based on 30 minutes of walking a day (about 4,000 to 5,000 steps). Plus, the positive benefits (according to the study) increase when participants added more distance and speed. And finally, this study showed that walking has a positive impact on all of the following: dementia, peripheral artery disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, colon cancer and even erectile dysfunction.
”
”
S.J. Scott (10,000 Steps Blueprint - the daily walking habit for healthy weight loss and lifelong fitness)
“
In many online breast cancer groups, members get upset when you question any authority’s position. When patients invest in that authority, they don’t want to see their investment devalued or diminished by questioning.
”
”
Lynne Farrow (The Iodine Crisis: What You Don't Know About Iodine Can Wreck Your Life)
“
Kent Myers was an asshole. We had the unfortunate pleasure of sitting across from each other at our chemotherapy appointments. Or as Kent liked to call it, ‘Fuck this bullshit in the fucking ass.’ He had a way with words. He always gave the nurses a hard time, calling them dumbasses when they missed his veins for the IVs. He called one nurse Susie, even though his name was Steven. He called me the annoyingly positive cancer girl who quoted dead people.
”
”
Brittainy C. Cherry (Art & Soul)
“
The average person walks into their doctor's office ready to accept whatever is said and handed to them. Without taking time to research or gain more insight, they accept pills and treatment
without looking into other options.
Our nation overeats. We put toxic fake food into our bodies, but wonder why we're sick. We continue a vicious cycle of consuming the wrong foods and drinks along with a stressful lifestyle, yet
question why cancer is so rampant. Most of our society live in fear and believe they have no control.
My positive message is that we do have control. We need to take back ownership of our bodies and minds. Don't blindly fill prescriptions without first checking into potential side effects, adverse reactions, and long-term damage to your body and mind. Be conscious of what you are consuming. Be informed. Take the initiative to gain more knowledge. Understand your options so you may be in a better position to make an informed choice.
”
”
Dana Arcuri (Harvest of Hope: Living Victoriously Through Adversity)
“
How is Life Full of Choices? When we eat too much, we make a choice to be overweight. When we drink too much, we make a choice to have a headache the next day. If we drink and drive, we choose to risk being killed or killing someone in an accident. When we ill-treat people, we choose to be ill-treated in return. When we don’t care about other people, we choose not to be cared for by them. When we light up a cigarette, we choose to invite cancer. Choices have consequences. The most important thing to understand is that we are all free to the point of making choices. but, after we make a choice, the choice controls the chooser. We have no more choices. What is success? Series of positive choices is called success and series of negative choices is called failure. We have an equal opportunity to be unequal. The choice is ours. Life can be compared to a pottery maker who shapes clay in any form he wants. Similarly we can mould our lives into any shape we want.
”
”
Shiv Khera (You Can Win: A Step-by-Step Tool for Top Achievers)
“
Sturtevant’s rudimentary genetic map would foreshadow the vast and elaborate efforts to map genes along the human genome in the 1990s. By using linkage to establish the relative positions of genes on chromosomes, Sturtevant would also lay the groundwork for the future cloning of genes tied to complex familial diseases, such as breast cancer, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In about twelve hours, in an undergraduate dorm room in New York, he had poured the foundation for the Human Genome Project.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
At this time, therefore, I must conclude that high-current electrodes might enhance the growth of any preexisting tumor cells in the electrical path—unlike low-current silver, which when negative had no effect on, and when positive suspended, mitosis of cancer cells in our lab.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
Y’know, the one thing I hate most about all this cancer business,’ he said, gesturing at nothing, ‘is when people talk about fighting it. They talk about a battle against cancer. As though it’s possible to stop the unstoppable, with nothing more than courage or wishful thinking, or being positive or whatever. What a load of shite.
”
”
Matt Coyne (Frank and Red)
“
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
“
I fucking stunk. I mean embarrassingly stunk, and it reflected like a funhouse mirror in the eyes of everyone present including Mother—after she’d made such a production over me being in Hollywood chasing my acting dream. Testifying-in-court kind of stink. If you’ve ever had the honor of publically sucking on a grand scale, you know that the worst part is how you’re treated afterwards. People avoid you like you’re carrying head lice or, if cornered, try to spin an illusive positive angle, as though you are somehow unaware that you just ruthlessly embarrassed yourself. I’ve had friends with terminal cancer who’ve talked about getting similar reactions. I had acting cancer.
”
”
Doug Stanhope (Digging Up Mother: A Love Story)
“
We lose hope in an endless cycle of distress. To overcome our problems and find peace, we must realize we need a simple viewpoint shift: Focusing on the present and moving slowly. We should choose positivity, appreciate our blessings, and be satisfied regardless of hope. Once we see results, we can keep going. We believe our influential minds can handle this.
”
”
Jonathan Harnisch
“
Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of positivity. And it's cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to ourselves, and we do it to others.
”
”
Susan David
“
In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.
”
”
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction)
“
Hope is when we have a beautiful vision of something and a positive emotion to go along with it. When our world comes crashing down, when we are trapped in a deep, dark, despairing hopelessness, we need a bigger perspective. Hope comes when we reflect on all that we hold dear
and true, when we acknowledge a higher power, when we acknowledge God in our lives and begin to see what He has planned for our lives.
”
”
Laura Lane (Two Mothers, One Prayer: Facing your Child's Cancer with Hope, Strength, and Courage)
“
Whatever you do in life, do it to the best of your ability. That inner voice inside of you, trust it… it’s your intuition. It will guide you in the right direction. Try to be positive, ignore negativity, but if you see somethin’ ain’t right, that somethin’ is goin’ wrong, speak up. Live your life to the fullest! Cherish it… respect it. Live it till the wheels fall off! Write things down! Take pictures, pick roses with the thorns still attached so you can feel pain and see beauty all at one time… Eat chocolate cake ’till you’re sick, travel abroad, get to know folks who are totally different from you. Respect one another, too. Be the change you wanna see in others. Drink Gin Fizz and white wine with strawberries but most of all, the most important of all, ladies and gentlemen… don’t ever be afraid to fall in love…
”
”
Tiana Laveen (Cancer: Mr. Intuitive (The Zodiac Lovers #7))
“
Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12
”
”
Shawn Achor (The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work)
“
I discovered this tie several years ago when reporting on an FDA source’s tip about the suspected link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. The FDA official told me that the agency was contemplating requiring a breast cancer warning on antiperspirants based on several studies suggesting a possible link. But some inside the FDA felt that industry opposition would be insurmountable. It was an inside debate that would interest many in the public. As I pursued the story, the cosmetics industry wouldn’t do an interview but referred me to the American Cancer Society, which, they assured me, would defend their interests. Indeed, the American Cancer Society was all too happy to agree to appear on camera debunking any idea of a link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. But in my pre-interview with the Cancer Society’s chief doctor, I discovered he hadn’t read—and apparently didn’t know about—the latest peer-reviewed, published studies suggesting a link. That’s when I thought to ask the Cancer Society if it got funding from the cosmetics industry. The answer was a very defensive “Yes.” But the charity wouldn’t disclose how much and said they wouldn’t go through with the on-camera interview unless I agreed not to ask about the antiperspirant industry funding. I forwarded the studies to the American Cancer Society’s doctor. When he did the on-camera interview with me, he reversed his earlier position that had claimed the antiperspirant–breast cancer link was a “myth.” Instead, he answered my questions by deflecting—repeatedly stating, when asked about the latest antiperspirant studies, that women have more important things to focus on, such as getting regular mammograms.
”
”
Sharyl Attkisson (Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington)
“
Focusing on thoughts or images that make you feel good will enable you to be at a higher level energetically and, consequently, will draw to you a higher level of vibrational experience. In other words, positive thoughts will attract positive experiences. The reverse is also true. If you’ve fallen into the habit of negative obsessing and/or fear-based thinking, you need to know that you can shift to a healthier, happier mindset.
”
”
Susan Barbara Apollon (An Inside Job)
“
Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice)
“
The only real issue with these people, besides the occasional hygiene challenge, was that they always seemed to embrace failure as a positive outcome. “I have not failed,” they’d endlessly quote Edison, “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Which may be an acceptable thing to say in science but is absolutely the wrong thing to say to a roomful of investors looking for an immediate, high-ticket, chronic treatment for cancer.
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I’ve ever seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They’re like First World War stretcher beds. There’s no garden, no yard even. No nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They’re dying. They’re not being given a great deal of medical care. They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you’re lucky some Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of… They didn’t have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap. And I asked one of them why she was doing it and she said: “Well to clean it.” And I said, “Yes, but why are you not sterilizing it; why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?” She said: “There’s no point. There’s no time.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice)
“
He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.
”
”
Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
“
I’m so sick of that argument. I’ve been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby’s gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics.
”
”
Mur Lafferty (Six Wakes)
“
BILL MURRAY, Cast Member: Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever. So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?” We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.
”
”
James Andrew Miller (Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests)
“
Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. The men he broke made all these various exits but that never worried him. Somebody had to lose and only suckers worried.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (To Have and Have Not)
“
Things you shouldn’t do when someone is dying: Don’t talk about when your aunt or your grandmother or your dog died. This isn’t about you, and the sick person shouldn’t have to comfort you; it should be the other way around. There are concentric circles of grief: the patient is at the center, the next layer is the caregiver, then their kids, then close friends, and so on. Figure out what circle you’re in. If you are looking into the concentric circles, you give comfort. If you’re looking out, you receive it. Don’t say things that aren’t true: You’re going to beat this cancer! It’s all about a positive outlook! You look stronger! You aren’t fooling anyone. Don’t overact your happiness. It’s okay to be sad with someone who is dying. They’ve invited you close at a very tender time, and that’s a moment of grace you can share. Don’t think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels—or doesn’t—you’re giving him control at a time when he doesn’t have a lot of choices. Don’t be afraid of the silence. It’s okay to say nothing. Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right. Win and I have reached the stage where we can sit in quiet, without a background noise of NPR on the radio or the television murmuring.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (The Book of Two Ways)
“
I became a very timid individual. I became introspective. I wondered what had made me act the way I had acted. Why had I killed my fellow men in war, without any feeling, remorse, or regret? And when the war was over, why did I continue to drink and swagger around and get into fistfights? Why did I like to dish out pain, and why did I take positive delight in the suffering of others? Was I insane? Was it too much testosterone? Women don’t do things like that. The rapacious Will to Power lost its hold on me. Suddenly I began to feel sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures. You lose your health and you start thinking this way.
Has man become any better since the times of Theogenes? The world is replete with badness. I’m not talking about that old routine where you drag out the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, etc. It happens in our own backyard. Twentieth-century America is one of the most materially prosperous nations in history. But take a walk through an American prison, a nursing home, the slums where the homeless live in cardboard boxes, a cancer ward. Go to a Vietnam vets’ meeting, or an A.A. meeting, or an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. How hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses. Is the world not rather like a hell, as Schopenhauer, that clearheaded seer—who has helped me transform my suffering into an object of understanding—was so quick to point out? They called him a pessimist and dismissed him with a word, but it is peace and self-renewal that I have found in his pages.
”
”
Thom Jones (The Pugilist at Rest)
“
The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate.
Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be. As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it. That form of positive thinking is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. The adult who remains hurt without being aware of it makes this residual defence of the child into a life principle. The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: what is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future? Many approaches focus only on the second half of that healing dyad without considering fully what led to the manifestation of illness in the first place.
Such “positive” methods fill the bookshelves and the airwaves. In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this fear to dominate engenders a state of childhood apprehension. Whether or not the apprehension is conscious, it is a state of stress. Second, lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress and one of the potent activators of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response. Third, stress wanes as independent, autonomous control increases.
One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces more powerful than he is. His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has “chosen” his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.
”
”
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
ALTHOUGH I STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT the best thing I can do for myself and others is to consciously keep myself uplifted and do what makes me feel happy, you may be surprised to learn that I don’t advocate “positive thinking” as a blanket prescription. It’s true that since all of life is connected, keeping myself in high spirits has a larger impact, as it is also what I’m putting out to the Whole. However, if and when I notice negative thoughts creeping in, it seems best to allow them to pass through with acceptance and without judgment. When I try to suppress or force myself to change my feelings, the more I push them away, the more they push back. I just allow it all to flow through me, without judgment, and I find that the thoughts and emotions will pass. As a result, the right path for me unfolds in a totally natural way, letting me be who I truly am.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
Yet there is dynamism in our house. Day to day, week to week, Cady blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks indicating her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room. Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence—and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist. If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably. With little to distinguish one day from the next, time has begun to feel static. In English, we use the word time in different ways: “The time is two forty-five” versus “I’m going through a tough time.” These days, time feels less like the ticking clock and more like a state of being. Languor settles in. There’s a feeling of openness. As a surgeon, focused on a patient in the OR, I might have found the position of the clock’s hands arbitrary, but I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don't know. And so it's not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future - that is, beyond lunch.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.
But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
“
Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk. But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation. Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black. Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments. Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
I was most pleasantly surprised, with this chart, to see a Yod pointing at the Moon. After all, what other planet influences changeable behaviour and creates a strong magnetic pull? I am tempted to say that the problem of the Bermuda Triangle has been solved: it was the Moon all along! But it is obviously more complicated than that. For one thing, there is a theory that there is an energy vortex operating through the earth, with a corresponding ‘problem’ area on the other side of the world, based near the west coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean. I noticed when I was looking at my Atlas that these trouble spots are on, or near, the Tropic of Cancer in the north, and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south. Being that these circles are the northern-most and southern-most positions of the Sun as it passes over the earth at the summer and winter solstices, there must be a residue of magnetic energy along those lines. To create a vortex, another energy line must be intersecting each tropical line at a right angle (90°). We can see this energy line on the chart: the Pluto-Midheaven opposition would be operating at full strength, as the critical degree is within 45’ of true (meaning, that the difference between the position of Pluto and the Midheaven, directly overhead, is almost exactly 180°). Because Mars is conjunct to Pluto, also opposite to the Midheaven, stormy weather, previously noted in this book, was raging: a potent combination.
”
”
Christopher Miller
“
The piece would be a searing indictment of the super-rich. He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.
”
”
Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
“
Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the
human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years.
Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired.
As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.
”
”
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
One idea that has been repeatedly tested is that low mood can make people better at analyzing their environments. Classic experiments by psychologists Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy focused specifically on the accuracy of people’s perceptions of their control of events, using test situations that systematically varied in how much control the subject truly had. In different conditions, subjects’ responses (pressing or not pressing a button) controlled an environmental outcome (turning on a green light) to varying degrees. Interestingly, subjects who were dysphoric (in a negative mood and exhibiting other symptoms of depression) were superior at this task to subjects who were nondysphoric (in a normal mood). Subjects who were in a normal mood were more likely to overestimate or underestimate how much control they had over the light coming on.7 Dubbed depressive realism, Alloy and Abramson’s work has inspired other, often quite sophisticated, experimental demonstrations of ways that low mood can lead to better, clearer thinking.8 In 2007 studies by Australian psychologist Joseph Forgas found that a brief mood induction changed how well people were able to argue. Compared to subjects in a positive mood, subjects who were put in a negative mood (by watching a ten-minute film about death from cancer) produced more effective persuasive messages on a standardized topic such as raising student fees or aboriginal land rights. Follow-up analyses found that the key reason the sadder people were more persuasive was that their arguments were richer in concrete detail (see Figure 2.2).9 In other experiments, Forgas and his colleagues have demonstrated diverse benefits of a sad mood. It can improve memory performance, reduce errors in judgment, make people slightly better at detecting deception in others, and foster more effective interpersonal strategies, such as increasing the politeness of requests. What seems to tie together these disparate effects is that a sad mood, at least of the garden variety, makes people more deliberate, skeptical, and careful in how they process information from their environment.
”
”
Jonathan Rottenberg (The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic)
“
The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things we cannot change: a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside. The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not the collective will to maintain them. A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be. Once awakened, we then have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity. The goal of this work has not been to resolve all of the problems of a millennia-old phenomenon, but to cast a light onto its history, its consequences, and its presence in our everyday lives and to express hopes for its resolution. A housing inspector does not make the repairs on the building he has examined. It is for the owners, meaning each of us, to correct the ruptures we have inherited. The fact is that the bottom caste, though it bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often been least likely to want to. Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the country’s DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened.
”
”
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
“
Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?
”
”
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
“
The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.
Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls.
The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.
”
”
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
Even targeted therapy, then, was a cat-and-mouse game. One could direct endless arrows at the Achilles' heel of cancer, but the disease might simply shift its foot, switching one vulnerability for another. We were locked in a perpetual battle with a volatile combatant. ... the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
Vogelstein’s challenge was that of the landscape artist: How does one convey the gestalt of a territory (in this case, the “territory” of a genome) in a few broad strokes of a brush? How can a picture describe the essence of a place?Vogelstein’s answer to these questions borrows beautifully from an insight long familiar to classical landscape artists: negative space can be used to convey expanse, while positive space conveys detail. To view the landscape of the cancer genome panoramically, Vogelstein splayed out the entire human genome as if it were a piece of thread zigzagging across a square sheet of paper. (Science keeps eddying into its past: the word mitosis -- Greek for "thread" -- is resonant herw again.)
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
We must keep our heads high, stay positive, move forward, and roll with the punches. With that, trust the battle. Trust the struggle. Trust yourself. Trust it, and know you can create your own strength. You have the power to persevere.
”
”
Alexa Cucchiara
“
If you just juice, drink herbs, herbal teas and juices, even herbal coffees, herbs-added hot chocolate... You can drink any of that. Whether your problems are as simple as migraine or knee pain or small back pain or as difficult and complicated as cancers, any level, any problem, any disease - ‘langanam parama aushadam’ is the medicine.
”
”
Paramahamsa Nithyananda
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When Mom says “bong,” she means her nebulizer. It turns water into vapor, and she huffs it all day like a singer breathing hot mist before a performance. Except Mom’s machine is handheld. I’m surprised she doesn’t carry it in a gun sling. But my mom is not just inhaling water. “Let’s get some colloidal silver in those lungs,” she says. Second to prayer, colloidal silver is Mom’s insurance policy on life. She makes her own, soaking two silver rods in a glass vat of water that sits next to her kitchen sink. I’ll let her explain it. This is from one of her emails telling me how to live forever: “I use distilled water and 99% pure silver rods. The rods are connected to a positive and negative charge (think of a jumper cable for your car) and they are immersed in the distilled water. Some people leave the rods in the water 2–4 hours. I leave mine in for 8–12 hours so my silver water is extra strength and powerful…I drink ¼ cup colloidal silver in a glass of water before bed, and have for years and years. RARELY am I ever sick. I take a bottle of colloidal silver on every trip (especially overseas) in case I pick up a stomach bug or am around anyone who is sick. I use it on wounds, use it for pink eye, ear infections, the flu, and more because it kills over 600 viruses and most bacteria, including MRSA. There are also studies that show the benefits of colloidal silver against cancer.” Every time I’m home, she gives me a bottle of the stuff to take back to Los Angeles. I, like a good millennial, googled its effectiveness. The scientific establishment seems to believe that colloidal silver does approximately nothing good, and in large quantities, some bad. Perhaps you’ve seen the viral meme of the old blue man? He consumed so much colloidal silver that his skin dyed blue from the inside. He looks like a Smurf with a white beard. Well, he looked like a Smurf. He’s dead. Maybe from something common like heart failure, but… When I told my mother this, she wouldn’t hear it. “I know it works. I’ve been using it for years. I don’t care what those articles say. I’ve read hundreds of articles about it.
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Jedidiah Jenkins (Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences)
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One reason for this “dirty little secret” is the positive publication bias described in Chapter 7. If researchers and medical journals pay attention to positive findings and ignore negative findings, then they may well publish the one study that finds a drug effective and ignore the nineteen in which it has no effect. Some clinical trials may also have small samples (such as for a rare diseases), which magnifies the chances that random variation in the data will get more attention than it deserves. On top of that, researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn’t cure cancer.)
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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Soy Fear of eating soy, especially with hormone-positive breast cancers, stems from the idea that phytoestrogen compounds in soybeans have estrogen-like properties. However, plant-based estrogens are chemically different from human. In fact, research on consumption of soy foods and cancer (though limited), suggests that eating whole soybean products like tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk, or similar may actually have a positive impact on overall mortality and prevention of breast cancer.
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Rhiannon Lambert (The Science of Nutrition: Debunk the Diet Myths and Learn How to Eat Responsibly for Health and Happiness (The Science of Food))
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New technologies, like biofeedback, were helping us understand that the mind can indeed control the body. New research has even shown that the mind is able to positively or negatively influence the immune system, and our body’s ability to fight against cancers and infections. Medicine men were capable of working through channels that we in Western medicine did not yet understand.
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Lori Arviso Alvord (The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing)
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However, Wallace's research proceeded on the assumption that people are aging not by bits and pieces but as human beings as a whole. Consequently, ageing contains a large option dimension. When old people will maintain their mental faculties by using them constantly, then the practice of meditation, which fully unlocks the mind, can do even more. As mentioned earlier, Wallace's basic observation was that long-term meditators had their biological age lowered by five to twelve years. (High levels of an unknown hormone called DHEA[dehydroepiandrosterone] have also been found; it has been hypothesized that DHEA somehow helps slow aging and may prevent cancer development and growth.) This research suggests that aging is regulated by consciousness. Operating at the usual level of shallow, confused thinking, we intensify the aging process of our bodies, but as we step into the transcendent area of quiet movement, mental activity ceases, and cell activity evidently responds accordingly. If this is true, then ageing can be programmed from different awareness levels. When we program to deteriorate ourselves, which was the norm in previous generations, then that becomes the truth. This kind of programming is not simply a matter of reasoning or believing. Positive attitudes, mental alertness, willingness to survive and other psychological characteristics can ease old age; they certainly help to crack the rigid social conditioning that often traps old people.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Search books that will compete with your book and read the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Read what people like but also focus on what they don’t like. What do they want that is a bit different and missing from existing books? I’m not looking for haters; I’m looking for people who provide constructive ideas. For example, while doing research for a client writing a book on handling cancer treatments, I noticed a competing book had several comments that said the book was great but neglected the emotional aspect of dealing with cancer. This helped us advise her that there was an opportunity to position her book with more of an emotional component.
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Julie Broad (Self-Publish & Succeed: The No Boring Books Way to Writing a Non-Fiction Book that Sells)
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A 2007 article in Scientific American concluded that at best “the immune system functions as a double-edged sword. . . . Sometimes it promotes cancer; other times it hinders disease.
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Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
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Burr was in. He enthusiastically sent one of his contraptions back with Langman to his wards, where, in an initial group of 100 women, he strapped one electrode to the lower abdomen above the pubis, and the other either on or alongside the cervix.6 Women whose troubles turned out to be caused by ovarian cysts or other non-cancerous medical issues almost always had a positive reading. Women with malignant tumors, however, showed an electrical “marked negativity” of the cervical region every time.7 Langman confirmed their diagnosis with a pathological examination. Cancerous tissues, it appeared, emitted an unmistakable electrical signature. Langman repeated the technique in about a thousand women to see whether his results stood up. They did: 102 of his patients exhibited the characteristic voltage reversals. When Langman operated on them, he confirmed that 95 of the 102 had cancer.8 Even more remarkably, often the masses had not even progressed to the point where the symptoms would have driven them to visit the doctor, never mind obtain a correct diagnosis. After removing these cancers, the electrical polarity shown on the electrometer would normally flip back to a “healthy” positive indicator—but it did not always. When it stayed negative, Burr and Langman suspected that this indicated that they either hadn’t got it all, or the cells had metastasized. Somewhere in the body, a cancerous mass was still sending its nefarious signals. What struck them as especially strange was that the electrode inside the genital tract did not have to be placed directly on, or even particularly near to, the malignant tissue for the anomaly to be detectable. It was like a distress signal was being sent over distances through the body’s healthy tissue.
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Sally Adee (We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds)
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Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - The Science of Healthy Eating
Healthy eating is not just a trend; it's a science that holds the key to a longer, more vibrant life. The choices we make when it comes to food have a profound impact on our overall well-being, from our physical health to our mental clarity. Understanding the science behind healthy eating empowers us to make informed choices and lead healthier lives.
At its core, healthy eating is about nourishing our bodies with the right balance of nutrients. This means consuming a variety of foods rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, proteins, and healthy fats. The science shows that such a diet can:
Saad Jalal Promote Physical Health: Nutrient-dense foods provide essential vitamins and minerals that support bodily functions. They can help prevent chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.
Boost Mental Health: A well-balanced diet can positively impact mood and cognitive function. Nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants found in certain foods have been linked to improved mental well-being.
Sustain Energy: Healthy eating provides a steady supply of energy throughout the day, avoiding energy crashes and fatigue.
Saad Jalal Toronto Canada said Complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and healthy fats are key players in this process.
Support Digestive Health: Foods rich in fiber promote healthy digestion and regular bowel movements. They maintain gut health and contribute to a strong immune system.
Maintain Healthy Weight: Portion control and balanced nutrition are fundamental to weight management. Eating mindfully and recognizing hunger cues can help control calorie intake.
The science of healthy eating is an evolving field, continually revealing new insights into the connection between diet and well-being. By staying informed and making conscientious choices, we can harness this knowledge to lead healthier, happier lives. So, let's embrace the science of healthy eating and make every meal a step towards a brighter, healthier future.
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Saad Jalal - Toronto Canada
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An excessively positive outlook can also complicate dying. Psychologist James Coyne has focused his career on end-of-life attitudes in patients with terminal cancer. He points out that dying in a culture obsessed with positive thinking can have devastating psychological consequences for the person facing death. Dying is difficult. Everyone copes and grieves in different ways. But one thing is for certain: If you think you can will your way out of a terminal illness, you will be faced with profound disappointment. Individuals swept up in the positive-thinking movement may delay meaningful, evidence-based treatment (or neglect it altogether), instead clinging to so-called “manifestation” practices in the hope of curing disease. Unfortunately, this approach will most often lead to tragedy. In perhaps one of the largest investigations on the topic to date, Dr. Coyne found that there is simply no relationship between emotional well-being and mortality in the terminally ill (see James Coyne, Howard Tennen, and Adelita Ranchor, 2010). Not only will positive thinking do nothing to delay the inevitable; it may make what little time is left more difficult. People die in different ways, and quality of life can be heavily affected by external societal pressures. If an individual feels angry or sad but continues to bear the burden of friends’, loved ones’, and even medical professionals’ expectations to “keep a brave face” or “stay positive,” such tension can significantly diminish quality of life in one’s final days. And it’s not just the sick and dying who are negatively impacted by positive-thinking pseudoscience. By its very design, it preys on the weak, the poor, the needy, the down-and-out. Preaching a gospel of abundance through mental power sets society as a whole up for failure. Instead of doing the required work or taking stock of the harsh realities we often face, individuals find themselves hoping, wishing, and praying for that love, money, or fame that will likely never come. This in turn has the potential to set off a feedback loop of despair and failure.
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Steven Novella (The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake)
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history. Their position shows little deviation in seasonal day length as well. This is due to Hawaiʻi being relatively close to the equator, which means it is not as affected by the sun’s yearly north-to-south shift between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The longest summer day in Hawaiʻi is just over thirteen hours long, and the shortest day is a little under eleven hours long, a minor difference.
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Captivating History (History of Hawaii: A Captivating Guide to Hawaiian History (U.S. States))
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Another new alternative possibility is adding hydrogen-rich water to your daily diet, best taken on an empty stomach. The research is in its infancy, yet the benefits are all positive, especially around fibrotic tissue and complete health.
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Ron Baron (Confronting Radiation Fibrosis: A Cancer Survivor's Handbook (A Basic Understanding))
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Compte tenu de toutes les conditions dont je dirais à présent qu'elles sont les miennes, je ne peux qu'être content de ce que j'aie attrapé le cancer et qu'au cours de la psychothérapie tout ce que j'ai vécu jusqu'à présent se soit effondré. Il m'est impossible de souhaiter que tout cela ne se soit pas produit ; je ne peux que le trouver bien. Je ne peux pas souhaiter non plus que tout soit tout autrement car il me faudrait souhaiter alors d'être quelqu'un d'autre, et cela est impossible. Je ne peux pas souhaiter d'être M. Dupont plutôt que moi-même. Je ne puis pas souhaiter que ce qui a eu lieu jusqu'ici n'ait pas eu lieu ou ait eu lieu autrement, au contraire il me faut comprendre qu'étant donné les conditions de ma vie, tout ce qui s'est passé jusqu'à présent a dû se passer comme cela s'est passé et qu'il n'est ni possible ni souhaitable qu'il en soit autrement. La seule chose que je puisse souhaiter, c'est que la situation actuelle tourne bien ; d'ailleurs ce souhait est encore possible et parfaitement réaliste. Je n'ai nul besoin de souhaiter quelque chose d'irréel, tout ce qui serait irréel, je ne tiens pas du tout à me le souhaiter. Du fait que je vois la nécessité de ma position présente, elle me devient plus supportable que si je devais la considérer comme tout à fait absurde. (p. 219)
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Fritz Zorn (Mars)
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What if I hadn’t worked so hard? What if … I had actually used … my position to be a role model for balance? Had I done so intentionally, who’s to say that, besides having more time with my family, I wouldn’t also have been even more focused at work? More creative? More productive? It took inoperable late stage brain cancer to get me to examine things from this angle. —Eugene O’Kelly, former CEO, KPMG
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Brigid Schulte (Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time)
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Well, you’ve already fucked up the atmosphere,” he says. “What are you going to do about it?” “Nothing,” I say. “I’m going to do nothing.” Friday has been a part of our circle for four years. But almost all of that time, I thought she was a lesbian. The five minutes when I didn’t is when the trouble started. “It didn’t look like nothing when we got here. You were kissing her eyelids and she didn’t seem too put out by it.” “She’s not in the right position for what I want,” I say. I can’t tell him about her being pregnant. It’s not my story to tell. He grins. “Well, what position did you want her in?” “Shut up,” I grouse. “If she’s in the wrong position, flip her the fuck over.” He throws up his hands. “Hell, turn her upside down if you have to.” “It’s not that easy.” His gaze softens. “Nothing worth having is easy to get.” If anyone would know, it’s Matt. He battled cancer and thought he would never get married or have a kid, and now he has three with twins on the way. He fought, and he won. “Is she worth having?” Matt asks. “I don’t know.” I shake my head. “Do you want to find out?” “I don’t know.” I drag a hand down my face. “I never took you for being a quitter.” I heave in a breath. “I’ve never quit anything on purpose. But this fight might be more than I want to take on.
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Tammy Falkner (Proving Paul's Promise (The Reed Brothers, #5))
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Our Paleolithic ancestors got anywhere from 50 to 100 g of fiber a day in their diet. The National Cancer Institute—not exactly a hotbed of nutritional radicalism—recommends at least 25 g a day, as do the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. The position paper on dietary fiber and colon cancer of the American Gastroenterological Association states that “reasonable recommendations based on currently available data” argue for a recommended daily fiber intake of at least 30 to 35 g a day. Want to know the average daily intake in America? Eleven grams. Beans Provide the Fiber Missing from
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Jonny Bowden (The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What You Should Eat and Why)
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Think like the enemy, Steph thought. If I'm running ISIS, what do I want to do? What do I want to accomplish? The answer didn't require much thought. Annihilate the infidel and raise the black flag over the entire world. Islamic fanaticism had only one goal in mind. Stephanie couldn't believe there were still people who refused to see the reality of that goal and acknowledge the hatred aimed at achieving it. But then again, reality had never been popular if it conflicted with belief. In this case, far too many people wanted to believe only in the positive aspects of Islam without looking at its dark side. All they had to do was study history to see that the cancerous aberration of ISIS was nothing new. Annihilate
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Alex Lukeman (The Cup (The Project #13))
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Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief.
If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.
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Judy Cornish
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In 1933, the regional elections held in many parts of Germany, overwhelmingly favored the NAZI Partei. The full name of this vile group was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and actually was originally abbreviated NSDAP, not NAZI. With what seemed to be decisive popular approval, the Reichstag endorsed Hitler. On the morning of January 30, 1933, at the Presidential Palace, Hindenburg swore in Adolf Hitler as the Reich Chancellor of Germany, a title equivalent to that of the Prime Minister of England.
However, as the Reich Chancellor, Hitler was in a relatively stronger position of authority than the Prime Minister of England. Everything being equal, it would be much more difficult to remove him from power since the Chancellor of Germany remains in office until the majority of the Bundestag can agree on a successor, whereas the Prime Minister serves at the whim of his party.
Hindenburg publicly denounced any responsibility for appointing this “Austrian Corporal” to the Reich Chancellery, while he prudently caved in to Adolf Hitler’s popular demands. On the other hand, Hitler frequently referred to Hindenburg as “that old fool.” Although the men maintained an appearance of cordiality to each other in public, Hitler did not respect the “Old War Horse” and there was definitely no love lost between them.
During the following summer, Hindenburg grew increasingly concerned about the radical Nazi rallies in Nuremburg, and the political demonstrations that were being carried out throughout Germany. During the summer of 1934, the elderly German President became extremely ill and was close to death at his mansion in East Prussia. Having contracted lung cancer, he had been incapacitated and bedridden for several months, thereby giving Hitler enough time to plan and impose his next move.
On August 2, 1934, at 9:00 a.m., the long awaited demise of 86-year-old Hindenburg finally occurred in the town of Neudeck, near Rosenberg, East Prussia. Within hours after the announcement of Hindenburg’s death, Hitler seized total control of Germany by establishing himself in the contrived, dictatorial and ultimate position of “der Führer.” It was in this way that he became the supreme leader of Germany, ruling until 1945.
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Hank Bracker
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Palliative care, the branch of medicine that focuses on symptom relief and comfort, had been perceived as the antimatter of cancer therapy, the negative to its positive, an admission of failure to its rhetoric of success.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
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Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force.
Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure!
In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.
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Hank Bracker
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It is when you stop resisting and choose an attitude of acceptance and positivity that you are able to shift your energetic experience to a higher plane and thereby attract and allow in experiences that are more in alignment with your hopes and dreams.
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Susan Barbara Apollon (An Inside Job)
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I would tell someone who’s battling cancer to write down the five to
ten things that you look forward to doing with the rest of your life. In other words, your future should be the focus. For example, ‘I want to see my grandchildren,’ or ‘I want to take that trip.’ You’ve got to find something to look forward to that will give you strength. You want it to draw you like a magnet. If you don’t try to self-motivate yourself through positive thoughts, cancer will win because it’s not easily defeated.
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Joe Marelle
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an avalanche of research shows that happy marriages can boost your health and wellbeing. People in positive long-term relationships have lower rates of heart disease, live longer, and are less likely to develop cancer.
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Jancee Dunn (How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids)
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Dad, I'm not sure if I'm going to beat cancer, but I promise you, I'll never let cancer beat me
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Andy Smith (It's Positively Cancer: a daughter's blog, a dad's farewell)
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I bloody well know she was dying,’ Walter corrected gruffly. ‘She told me. Cancer,’ he added succinctly. ‘And how did she take it?’ Hillary asked, then added quickly, ‘I mean, I know it must have been a shock. I’m sure she was angry, and upset, but generally speaking — did it make her very depressed, or was she more inclined to be scared or introspective? I’m sorry to be asking a question like this, especially over the telephone, but it might be important.’ Over the wire, Walter Keane sighed heavily. ‘Well, it rocked her a bit, of course,’ he agreed. ‘And she had a bit of a weep, like, when she told me. But Flo was never really one to let things get on top of her. She read up on this remission thing, where terminally ill people suddenly get better for a little while. Amazing thing that, not even the doctors know why. She often said she might go in for a bit of that, like. As if, by the power of positive thinking, she could make it happen.’ Walter
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Faith Martin (Murder at Home (DI Hillary Greene #6))
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In contrast to the positive associations for total and dietary calcium, there was no association with intake of nondairy calcium. This result might have suggested that other components of dairy products than calcium contribute to [prostrate cancer] risk.
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Dagfinn Aune
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The fundamentalism that drove them was a cancer. It infected almost everyone it touched. And yet the people best positioned to remove the cancer lacked the courage and the desire to do so. No matter how many atrocities were committed in the name of their religion and their God, the Muslim world was wholly incapable of combating the problem.
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Brad Thor (Use of Force (Scot Harvath, #16))
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Those most critical factors giving a positive self basically want to cover the first edition. That's pretty strong earnings, unemployment, and some cannot Prostatis even be informed. Talk to your employer and give generally positive, they are not. Relevance Tab justified confidence that the business aspects, really, that this, after all, attractive to employers incentives, long-term employees, and where the only specialized services for industry and again the other for employees of highest quality that are more difficult problem to treat, made only more secure, since it is to find a person.
Although the direction of transmission of buying Prostatis insurance on their own, more attention is considerable, certainly in the sense that the plan to "complete" and "renewable insurance." This suggests that other, as you continue to receive payment of costs should not be fully covered by commercial insurance. Not even know that the level of demand in the economy Although in good condition I, and the company has taken the right path, and then joined a vague clause to complete the plan in principle and in its way through, you can also apply safeguards Generally they produce, the plan rescission period is 10 days during the working sets, make sure it's perfect, then throw the cards, if not immediately.
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An insurance company to a higher potential, to ensure that purchasers or plans worth more to feel a little pressure, the result is inevitable that insurance is available against people who have contact to practice for a few days . Basically it is to maintain the power to print money to unrealistic levels.
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ProstateSolomon
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I can categorically state that of all the operations and treatments, and even including the taking of the tiresome Tamoxifen (better known as Tamoxibollox), that the time of not knowing was positively the worst of it all.
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Jackie Buxton (Tea & Chemo: Fighting Cancer, Living Life)
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It’s not easy to keep moving forward with a positive outlook. I have the sense that I’m teetering on a very thin line. When I take my pills in the morning, I imagine them working toward ensuring the 93 percent chance at life that I have. When I eat ice cream or a piece of birthday cake, I remember the 7 percent and picture the tiny granules of sugar dispersing into some vulnerable area of my body, feeding any possible lingering, hungry cancer cells the surgeon missed. To an outsider, 7 percent might seem like a great prognosis. Tig, why are you even going into this? This is great news! And it is great news and a great prognosis. But when it’s your prognosis, you never forget the 7 percent. You just keep going.
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Tig Notaro (I'm Just a Person)
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HOW TO OPEN A POMEGRANATE Purchase a firm fruit. Keep it refrigerated until use, for freshness. Cut around the center (the “equator,” if you will), inserting the knife about half an inch all the way around; then twist the fruit apart, separating it into two halves. Hold the half pomegranate in your cupped hand, with the cut side down, and position that hand over a large salad bowl. Using the side of a heavy wooden spoon, bang the pomegranate hard all around the top dome, around the middle, and all around the bottom edge close to your hand. Give every square inch a good hit. You should be able to see the skin softening and bending as you smack it, and feel the small red seeds falling past your hand and into the salad bowl. Now take the softened skin and invert it—turn it inside out—to remove any remaining seeds with your fingers. Repeat for the other side. Eat your pomegranate seeds plain, use them in salads and recipes, or freeze them for later use, when they are out of season. There are some great ideas in the recipes at the end of the book to help you enjoy pomegranates often in your eating plan. Interestingly, pomegranates offer significant active protection against breast cancer.
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Joel Fuhrman (Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body's Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free – From a Bestselling Doctor (Eat for Life))
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It is in the quiet moments of reflection that we can gain a greater feeling of hope when we remember and recognize all the positive things that are happening during this time of great difficulty.
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Laura Lane (Two Mothers, One Prayer: Facing your Child's Cancer with Hope, Strength, and Courage)
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A key step toward revitalization is to develop a positive future projection for yourself. Start by writing down your immediate and long-term goals. How would you like to see yourself one year, three years, and five years from now? Write a brief description of these images, using visual details and sounds, identifying the people around you, the focus of your time, and how you will evaluate whether you've reached your personal goals.
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Keith Block (Life Over Cancer: The Block Center Program for Integrative Cancer Treatment)
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When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I learned the word "malignant" and heard the word "spread" and knew the word "hope" was a mirage, a fantasy that would only make things worse. But then I learned the word "remission," and the doctors loosened their ties, cracked bad jokes (said her blood type was B-positive, so we should be optimistic, too), and they increased the odds of her survival to fifty-fifty, like she was something to wager on in Vegas. I slept well and ate well and celebrated on the inside. My kidneys shook pom-poms, my liver did an Irish jig, my small intestines did the worm. The future was bright with a likely chance of sunshine--and then it was over.
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Matt Blackstone (Sorry You're Lost)
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Table 29.1. “AA” (Avoid/Acquire) of Fighting Cancer. In closing, let me also share my new found philosophy of life: A good life is summarized in three “H’s.” They are, in order of importance: Happiness, Health, and . . . hmm, I forget the third one!!! Good luck in your fight and remember to stay Happy and Positive. After all, the reason it is said “you can’t buy happiness” is that because it is free!
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”
Donald I. Abrams (Integrative Oncology (Weil Integrative Medicine Library))
“
The bottom line is clear: harboring racist feelings in a multicultural society causes daily stress; this kind of stress can lead to chronic problems like cancer, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. But interracial interactions are not inherently stressful. Less prejudiced people show markedly different physiological responses during interracial interactions. In all three of these studies, people who had positive attitudes about people of other races responded to interracial interactions in ways that were happy, healthy, and adaptive.
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”
Jeremy A. Smith (Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology)
“
Any thought which brings with it fear, worry, anxiety etc. should be immediately banished from the mind by replacing such thoughts with self-assuring, positive and energizing thoughts. This is called 'Quantum Mind' and it can work miracles in your life.
”
”
Sanchita Pandey (Cancer to Cure)
“
Looking more closely, there are two pathways that link energy and estrogen to higher rates of reproductive cancers among women in developed countries. The first is how many menstrual cycles women experience. The average woman in countries such as the United States, England, and Japan starts menstruating when she is twelve or thirteen years old, and she continues to menstruate until her early fifties. Because she has access to birth control, she gets pregnant only once or twice over her lifetime. Further, after she gives birth, she probably breast-feeds her babies for less than a year. All told, she can expect to experience approximately 350 to 400 menstrual cycles during her life. In contrast, a typical hunter-gatherer woman starts menstruating when she is sixteen, and she spends the majority of her adult life either pregnant or nursing, often struggling to get enough energy to do so. She thus experiences a total of only about 150 menstrual cycles. Since each cycle floods a woman’s body with powerful hormones, it is not surprising that reproductive cancer rates have multiplied in recent generations as birth control and affluence has spread. The other key pathway that links chronic positive energy balances with reproductive cancers among women is through fat. Earlier,
”
”
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
“
Little did Mr. Knight know, Farren had taken her father’s position and Farren’s dad hated Christian. “Cancer
”
”
Nako (The Connect's Wife 4)
“
environmental science be
worth my while? Do I have a chance to get a good grade?” The
answers to these questions depend, to a large extent, on you and
how you decide to apply yourself. Expecting to be interested and
to do either well or poorly in your classes often turns out to be a
self-fulfilling prophecy. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think
you can do a thing, or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
Cultivating good study skills can help you to reach your goals
and make your experience in environmental science a satisfying
and rewarding one. The purpose of this introduction is to give you
some tips to help you get off to a good start in studying. You’ll find
that many of these techniques are also useful in other courses and
after you graduate, as well.
Environmental science, as you can see by skimming through
the table of contents of this book, is a complex, transdisciplinary
field that draws from many academic specialties. It is loaded with
facts, ideas, theories, and confusing data. It is also a dynamic,
highly contested subject. Topics such as environmental contributions to cancer rates, potential dangers of pesticides, or when and
how much global warming may be caused by human activities are
widely disputed. Often you will find distinguished and persuasive
experts who take completely opposite positions on any particular
question. It will take an active, organized approach on your part
to make sense of the vast amount of information you’ll encounter here. And it will take critical, thoughtful reasoning to formulate
your own position on the many controversial theories and
”
”
William P. Cunningham (Environmental Science: A Global Concern)
“
You see, team,” Dan said passionately, “our problem is negativity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I believe where there is a void, negativity will fill it. And, unfortunately, within every organization you get voids in communication between leaders and their employees and between different teams and team members. It happens everywhere: with sports teams, work teams, family teams. Within these voids, negativity starts to breed and grow and, eventually, like a cancer it will spread if you don’t address it. As an executive team it’s up to us to do everything we can to prevent these voids from occurring and when they do occur, we must quickly fill them with positive communication and positive energy. People don’t just want to be seen and heard. They want to hear and see, and if they don’t feel like they are part of the company then they will assume the worst and act accordingly.
”
”
Jon Gordon (The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work (Jon Gordon))
“
Some Points of My Philosophy We are each responsible for all of our experiences. Every thought we think is creating our future. The point of power is always in the present moment. Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt. The bottom line for everyone is, “I’m not good enough.” It’s only a thought, and a thought can be changed. We create every so-called illness in our body. Resentment, criticism, and guilt are the most damaging patterns. Releasing resentment will dissolve even cancer. We must release the past and forgive everyone. We must be willing to begin to learn to love ourselves. Self-approval and self-acceptance in the now are the keys to positive changes. When we really love ourselves, everything in our life works.
”
”
Louise L. Hay (You Can Heal Your Life)
“
Our measures of economic success, from corporate profits to gross national product (GNP), specifically ignore the human component of the economy. That’s how an environmental disaster and its resulting cancer rates can still be considered a net positive to the economy. They require more spending on cleanup and chemo, so it’s good for business as we currently define it. In less morbid examples, from corporate layoffs to tax law, we have set in place an economic system whose growth works against our own prosperity. We have lost track of the purpose of the economy.
”
”
Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
“
My dad was always tough to please. He thought pushing me would make me a man, but I was never man enough. All I ever wanted from him was a word of praise, a proud smile.” “What about your mother?” He smiled tenderly. “God, she was incredible. She always loved him, no matter what. And I didn’t have to do anything to make her think I was a hero. If I fell flat on my face she’d just beam and say, ‘Did you see that great routine of Ian’s? What a genius!’ When I was in that musical, she thought I was the best thing to hit Chico, but my dad asked me if I was gay.” He chuckled. “My mom was the best-natured, kindest, most generous woman who ever lived. Always positive. And faithful?” He laughed, shaking his head. “My dad could be in one of his negative moods where nothing was right—the dinner sucked, the ball game wasn’t coming in clear on the TV, the battery on the car was giving out, he hated work, the neighbors were too loud… And my mom, instead of saying, ‘Why don’t you grow the fuck up, you old turd,’ she would just say, ‘John, I bet I have something that will turn your mood around—I made a German chocolate cake.’” Marcie smiled. “She sounds wonderful.” “She was. Wonderful. Even while she was fighting cancer, she was so strong, so awesome that I kept thinking it was going to be all right, that she’d make it. As for my dad, he was always impossible to please, impossible to impress. I really thought I’d grown through it, you know? I got to the point real early where I finally understood that that’s just the kind of guy he was. He never beat me, he hardly even yelled at me. He didn’t get drunk, break up the furniture, miss work or—” “But what did he do, Ian?” she asked gently. He blinked a couple of times. “Did you know I got medals for getting Bobby out of Fallujah?” She nodded. “He got medals, too.” “My old man was there when I was decorated. He stood nice and tall, polite, and told everyone he knew about the medals. But he never said jack to me. Then when I told him I was getting out of the Marine Corps, he told me I was a fuckup. That I didn’t know a good thing when I had it. And he said…” He paused for a second. “He said he’d never been so ashamed of me in his whole goddamn life and if I did that—got out—I wasn’t his son.” Instead of crumbling into tears on his behalf, she leaned against him, stroked his cheek a little and smiled. “So—he was the same guy his whole stupid life.” Ian felt a slight, melancholy smile tug at his lips. “The same guy. One miserable son of a bitch.” “There’s
”
”
Robyn Carr (A Virgin River Christmas (Virgin River #4))
“
The Bible promises trials for followers of Christ, so we’re wise to prepare for battle now. A soldier doesn’t begin his training after he’s called into battle; he’s been sacrificing and preparing for months and years before his boots hit the battlefield. So, how do we put on our armor for a spiritual battle? By studying and memorizing God’s Word. It forms a protective shield over our souls, warding off enemy attacks. Many times this past year, I’ve had to cling to the Bible. From sad incidences like pit bulls killing our favorite family dog; to therapies not quite working to allow my youngest son to eat solid foods; to my oldest heading to Iraq again; to dangerous stalkers disrupting our lives; to parents’ health issues; to getting canned from one job and not knowing what was next; to a daughter’s long-awaited happy wedding that didn’t happen; to biopsy results positive for cancer; to all the messed-up political and national security issues I cover in my work; to . . . well, a whole lot more. It’s been a heck of a year, and I couldn’t get through it without God’s promises for a brighter day. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Memorizing Scripture is a tool to get us through to the other side. Write verses on Post-It Notes and stick them on mirrors, the fridge, the TV. Commit to memorizing new Scripture every month so that when trials come your way, you’ll be locked and loaded and ready for spiritual battle!
”
”
Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
“
Have you ever struggled through a fight but kept pushing on? Kara Tippetts, who is a mother of four had died of breast cancer. She had written The Hardest Peace to show how she was living the best way she could in her situation. She had never expressed any sort emotion that was never any positive feeling. Starting chapter one Tippetts combines both the mind and the heart in her writing. She does not give the reader any way of comparing their life to her story, having to look back on their own. Her book distinguishes many of her hardships that she had before her passing. Abuse, drugs, and broken relationships all lead up to her talk of cancer. Throughout this whole story Tippetts calls her cancer “hard”. She describes her fight with each hard, while demonstrating her feelings of grace. She had never once let her children or husband see her as unhappy. She wanted them to remember her as being this loving wife and mother that cared deeply for them.
I feel that this books stands out before all other when speaking of the fight against cancer. Having to always look in the positives shows that you accept what you have. Kara Tippetts has shown that living with happiness, means to enjoy life. When always focusing on the negatives you always feel like you need to please others rather than yourself. Her life, I feel resembles the Catholic Social teaching, “Call to family, community, and participations.” This teaching, I feel resembles her because it shows that marriage and family must be supported and strengthened. Tippetts wanted to show her happiness to her family, wanting to show that she is not in any case, worried. She wanted them to know that she was going to be home soon, meaning with God in Heaven. So what I have taken out of her story is this one thing, “Always keep a positive mind and never show that you are unhappy, for at the end of life there is always a silver lining.
”
”
Kara Tippetts
“
By Thursday the news had leaked out and a group of photographers waited for her outside the hospital. “People thought Diana only came in at the end,” says Angela. “Of course it wasn’t like that at all, we shared it all.” In the early hours of Thursday, August 23 the end came. When Adrian died, Angela went next door to telephone Diana. Before she could speak Diana said: “I’m on my way.” Shortly after she arrived they said the Lord’s Prayer together and then Diana left her friends to be alone for one last time. “I don’t know of anybody else who would have thought of me first,” says Angela. Then the protective side of Diana took over. She made up a bed for her friend, tucked her in and kissed her goodnight.
While she was asleep Diana knew that it would be best if Angela joined her family on holiday in France. She packed her suitcase for her and telephoned her husband in Montpellier to tell him that Angela was flying out as soon as she awoke. Then Diana walked upstairs to see the baby ward, the same unit where her own sons were born. She felt that it was important to see life as well as death, to try and balance her profound sense of loss with a feeling of rebirth. In those few months Diana had learned much about herself, reflecting the new start she had made in life.
It was all the more satisfying because for once she had not bowed to the royal family’s pressure. She knew that she had left Balmoral without first seeking permission from the Queen and in the last days there was insistence that she return promptly. The family felt that a token visit would have sufficed and seemed uneasy about her display of loyalty and devotion which clearly went far beyond the traditional call of duty. Her husband had never known much regard for her interests and he was less than sympathetic to the amount of time she spent caring for her friend. They failed to appreciate that she had made a commitment to Adrian Ward-Jackson, a commitment she was determined to keep. It mattered not whether he was dying of AIDS, cancer or some other disease, she had given her word to be with him at the end. She was not about to breach his trust. At that critical time she felt that her loyalty to her friends mattered as much as her duty towards the royal family. As she recalled to Angela: “You both need me. It’s a strange feeling being wanted for myself. Why me?”
While the Princess was Angela’s guardian angel at Adrian’s funeral, holding her hand throughout the service, it was at his memorial service where she needed her friend’s shoulder to cry on. It didn’t happen. They tried hard to sit together for the service but Buckingham Palace courtiers would not allow it. As the service at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge was a formal occasion, the royal family had to sit in pews on the right, the family and friends of the deceased on the left. In grief, as with so much in Diana’s life, the heavy hand of royal protocol prevented the Princess from fulfilling this very private moment in the way she would have wished. During the service Diana’s grief was apparent as she mourned the man whose road to death had given her such faith in herself.
The Princess no longer felt that she had to disguise her true feelings from the world. She could be herself rather than hide behind a mask. Those months nurturing Adrian had reordered her priorities in life. As she wrote to Angela shortly afterwards: “I reached a depth inside which I never imagined was possible. My outlook on life has changed its course and become more positive and balanced.
”
”
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
“
Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.
”
”
Alec J. Ross (The Industries of the Future)
“
hatred in and of itself is not evil. Hatred can in fact be a good thing, even a beautiful thing. We should bear in mind that indifference, not hatred, is love’s opposite. Hatred is a part of love and a sign of its vitality. Hatred is love in its ferocious and militant form. Whether it is a good hatred or a bad hatred depends on what, precisely, it is aimed at. Hatred aimed at the cancer patient is bad. Hatred aimed at the patient’s cancer is good. Not just acceptable, or admissible, but good. If you love a person, you must hate his cancer. There is no way to love someone while being indifferent, or tolerant, toward the disease that ravages him. Hatred always seeks to annihilate. So we should not want to rid the world of hatred unless we have rid it of all the things worth annihilating. Unfortunately, we have not accomplished that task and never will. There are many ugly, terrible, deadly, revolting things in our world, and we must have a raw, raging hatred for all of them—especially sin. The Bible repeatedly speaks of this holy and righteous hatred, and commands us—not merely allows us, but commands us—to have this sort of hatred in our hearts: Psalm 97: “Let those who love the Lord hate evil.” Proverbs 8:13: “To fear the Lord is to hate evil.” Romans 12:9: “Hate what is evil, cling to what is good.” Proverbs mentions seven things that God Himself hates, and in four places in the Bible (Genesis 4:10, Genesis 17:20, Exodus 2:23, James 5:4) we are told of sins so abominable that they “cry out” to Him for vengeance. A passage in Revelation is particularly interesting: “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people.… Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” God can find few redeeming qualities in the church in Ephesus—except for its hatred and intolerance. Those are the two things He cites positively, the two that they need not repent of. What redeeming qualities will He find in the church in America?
”
”
Matt Walsh (Church of Cowards: A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians)
“
Negativity captured in a cell is cancer; to win cancer you have to kill every bit of negativity with positive thoughts.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (If Cancer Can, You Too Can, Fight.)
“
Cancer grows faster in negativity. Be positive and come out stronger.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (If Cancer Can, You Too Can, Fight.)
“
also encourage you to watch the TED Talk called “How To Make Stress Your Friend” by Kelly McGonigal. McGonigal’s research shows that simply changing our perception of stress is enough to have a positive health impact.
”
”
Nicolette Richer (Eat Real to Heal: Using Food As Medicine to Reverse Chronic Diseases from Diabetes, Arthritis to Cancer and More)
“
her healthier. If she’d never got cancer, she might easily have overloaded her body with all sorts of sugars, fats and chemicals and got diabetes. She truly believed that. Her new diet had saved her in so many ways and had allowed her to have a certain amount of control over her body. It was a positive focus on the good that she could do herself. So much of having cancer was out of your control, but her diet was something she alone was in charge of and she’d embraced her new regime with a vigour she didn’t know she had. It might not save her life, but it was at least going part way to saving her sanity. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope for six weeks with a health freak to my left and a meditating Buddhist on my right,’ Audrey said.
”
”
Victoria Connelly (One Last Summer)
“
You may consider me as a sentimental one or a realistic one since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies have the capability, to develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second 2016, first caused esophagus damage and stomach hernia and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write the report about that. Such refusal created in my mind doubts that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role to damage and destroy my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath Miriam Sommer in The Hague, after a month discussing she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage, and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue, to suck, I did that; however, later I became suspicious, why she did that? -
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check up that I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked, and consequently, February 2017, they diagnose as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet the International Medical Guidelines, they let the patient suffering from the disease and treat it with a gravely cheap way, paying no proper care and attention. I am unaware of others' experiences in this regard.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage, and destruction of career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as my guidelines before criminals disappear that can lead to a positive result. Otherwise, I will be right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
- Ehsan Sehgal
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
I would like for us to dwell on the notion of “dictators killing their own people,” which is quite problematic and misleading.
First, the notion presumes that killing one’s own people is only done by directly using weapons and prisons, as commonly cited when referring to Arab dictators, but it overlooks the many other indirect ways through which a state can kill its own people, like denying them decent, livable wages; healthy, chemical-free, non-cancerous foods; access to decent basic healthcare and good education; and many other basic human rights that are a privilege not a right in the US. Never mind that the US doesn’t even come close in providing these basic needs whose lack can easily make any state responsible for “killing its own people”, I am not disclosing a secret when I say that the US equally fails in the test of not directly killing its own people through imprisoning and shooting blacks, immigrants, and Muslims.
The second serious problem with the statement of dictators “killing their own people” is the failure of many so-called academics and intellectuals who contribute to knowledge production in interrogating it in an honest manner, which, to me means that the starting point is always to look at how the US kills its own people. Once that is determined and confirmed, it would be hard to make the case that the US is in a position to go around the world hunting other authoritarian regimes who do kill their own people. This fact makes many academics and intellectuals—unless willing to pay a high price for speaking the truth—complicit with the agendas of the warmongers who have been exterminating the people of the Middle East for many decades now. As a result, one can’t help wondering whether the real job of many feeble and co-opted intellectuals and academics in America is to simply aid the establishment in promoting itself as a “free democracy”, and consequently aiding it with its false mission of “democratizing” other nations.
”
”
Louis Yako
“
Any positivity you bring to yourself, you’re bringing to the Whole.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
Once a physician knew the time of his patient’s birth he knew where to start, by computing the position of the heavenly bodies at birth and at the onset of the ailment. He might have with him, slung from his belt (pockets hadn’t yet been invented), a neat little ready reckoner of folded parchment, correlating the position of the sun and moon at the onset of the illness with the planet governing the part of the body affected. A headache should be referred to Aries. Taurus governed the neck, Gemini the chest, Cancer the lungs, Leo the stomach, Virgo the abdomen, Libra the lower abdomen, Scorpio the penis and testicles, Sagittarius the thighs, Capricorn the knees, Aquarius the calves and Pisces the ankles. The colour of the patient’s urine could also be relevant – any physician worth his salt would carry a shade card to match against the patient’s sample. Thus armed, the physician could make his diagnosis and advise on treatment, including the best day for blood-letting.
”
”
Liza Picard (Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England)
“
The violence [Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer “viral.” Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenomenon. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defense, but to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation—when too much exists—do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive from immunological negativity. Baudrillard’s theory of power [Gewalt] is riddled with leaps of argument and vague definitions because it attempts to describe the violence of positivity—or, in other words, the violence of the Same when no Otherness is involved—in immunological terms. Thus he writes: The violence of networks and the virtual is viral: it is the violence of benign extermination, operating at the genetic and communicational level; a violence of consensus. . . . A viral violence in the sense that it does not operate head-on, but by contiguity, contagion, and chain reaction, its aim being the loss of all our immunities. And also in the sense that, contrary to the historical violence of negation, this virus operates hyperpositively, like cancerous cells, through endless proliferation, excrescence, and metastases. Between virtuality and virality, there is a kind of complicity.
”
”
Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)
“
there is no context in which my ego, if not fastidiously monitored, won’t run amok. It is extremely difficult to put aside a lifetime’s conditioning. The only way I can stay drug free is one day at a time, with vigilance, humility, and support. My tendency is still, after eleven years, to drift towards oblivion. My appetite for attention too can only be positively directed with great care. Look out your window, turn on your TV, see which values are being promoted, which aspects of humanity are being celebrated. The alarm bells of fear and desire are everywhere; these powerful primal tools, designed to aid survival in a world unrecognizable to modern civilized humans, are relentlessly jangled. A facet of our unevolved nature—comparable to that which still craves sugar and fat, a relic from the days when it was scarce—is being pricked and jabbed and buzzed every time we see a billboard bikini or a Coca-Cola floozy. Our saber-toothed terrors and mammoth anxieties are being dragged up and strung out by shrill transmissions about immigrants, junkies, pit bulls, and cancer. Once I sat in that kundalini class, in white robes, cross-legged, with pan-piped serenity caressing the congregation as we meditated as one, and all I was really thinking about was if I should buy a gun. I was in America after all and you are allowed a gun. Have you ever held a Glock 38? It feels so cool in your hand. Even the word makes you feel tough. “Glock.” Tupac had one; Eminem loves them—I want one. Never mind all this hippie-dippie, yin–yang, Ramadan, green-juice bullshit; I want a gat, like Tupac. Of course, I think things like that; the messages that are broadcast on that frequency move fast and stick hard. Look at the state of the world. I didn’t buy one, though; my mum had to remind me that I’m a peace-loving lad and that if I had a gun in the house, the person most at risk would be me. The kundalini techniques worked: They advanced my mind, they tuned me in. How much more powerful these techniques would be if supported by a culture of spiritual evolution, not one of self-fortification.
”
”
Russell Brand (Revolution)
“
Many reports of dramatic and lasting changes catalyzed by a confrontation with death support this view. While working intensively over a ten-year period with patients facing death from cancer, I found that many of them, rather than succumb to numbing despair, were positively and dramatically transformed. They rearranged their life priorities by trivializing life's trivia. They assumed the power to choose not to do the things that they really did not wish to do. They communicated more deeply with those they loved, and appreciated more keenly the elemental facts of life-the changing seasons, the beauty of nature, the last Christmas or New Year.
”
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Irvin D. Yalom (Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death)
“
My last chemo treatment was right around the corner. The enemy I'd pictured pulling a sneak attack on me was losing. My healthy-cell cancer fighter's were kicking in the swinging doors like an old Western movie and smoking those cancer cells one by one. They were doing the physical work; the least I could do was the mental olympics.
The unexpected gift of mental fortitude feels like a secret in the breast cancer sisterhood community.
Let’s vow to one another to accept positive energy only, including from our brains to ourselves.
”
”
Cara Sapida
“
They found those who reported having negative experiences with friends and acquaintances had a higher level of proteins related to inflammation in the body, compared with those who reported positive interactions with people. These proteins are associated with a number of chronic conditions, including heart disease, cancer, and depression.
”
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Gary W. Keith (Overcoming a Childhood of Abuse and Dysfunctional Living: How I Did It)
“
For example, having been in the rare position of working in the fields of both healing and management, I could not help but notice that the batting average in the war on cancer and the batting average in the struggle to heal chronically troubled institutions are remarkably similar, with cancer perhaps a little ahead. I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left. “New blood” rarely thwarts malignant processes, anywhere. Indeed, with both cancer and institutions, malignant cells that appear to be dead can often revive if they receive new nourishment. Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?
”
”
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
“
Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their behavior: lung cancer results from smoking, heart disease from a lack of exercise, colon cancer from not eating enough fiber, etc. By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness
pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.”
In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer
necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.” The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment.
This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience
of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.
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Todd McGowan (The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Psychoanalysis and Culture))
“
We are each responsible for all of our experiences. Every thought we think is creating our future. The point of power is always in the present moment. Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt. The bottom line for everyone is,
“I’m not good enough.” It’s only a thought, and a thought can be changed. We create every so-called illness in our body. Resentment, criticism, and guilt
are the most damaging patterns. Releasing resentment will dissolve even cancer. We must release the past and forgive everyone. We must be willing to begin to learn to love ourselves. Self-approval and self-acceptance in the now
are the keys to positive changes. When we really love ourselves, everything in our life works.
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Louise L. Hay (You Can Heal Your Life)
“
William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
“
Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of
On the Origin of Species
.
”
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Terence Allen (The Cell: A Very Short Introduction)
“
I’ve talked throughout this book about the importance of chosen suffering, its role in pleasure and meaning, and I’ll say more about this in the next and final chapter. But my assessment here of unchosen suffering is less positive. We try to tell stories about its value, and some of these stories may have some truth—we’ve seen some evidence that some amount of suffering in your life does make you kinder and more resilient. And it might be psychologically useful to try to find benefit in loss and pain. Still, this is a case where common sense is right: we are smart to try to avoid cancer, mass shootings, the death of our children, and other horrors. After all, even if suffering does have its benefits, it’s pretty likely that enough of it will come to you and those you love regardless of what you do. You don’t have to look for more.
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Paul Bloom (The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning)
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The logical mind tries to remind itself that sometimes you must suffer in order to feel better. But the body has its own memory: It remembers who hurt it. On an irrational level, I felt wronged by those whom I saw as having “poisoned” me (people in lab coats, phlebotomists, my mother) and by those who encouraged me to think positively about it (friends, Hallmark cards, the “cancer books” section of Barnes & Noble). Finding the silver lining felt like part of the punishment.
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Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted)
“
You may consider me sentimental or realistic since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies can develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second in 2016, first causing esophagus damage and stomach hernia, and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried for years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write a report about that. Such refusal created doubts in my mind that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role in damaging and destroying my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath, Miriam Sommer, in The Hague; after a month's discussion, she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue to suck, and I did that. However, later I became suspicious of why she did do that.
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check what I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked it, and consequently, in February 2017, they diagnosed as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet International Medical Guidelines; they let the patients suffering from the disease and treat them in a gravely poor way, paying no proper care and attention. In this regard, I am unaware of others' experiences.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage and the destruction of my career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as guidelines before criminals disappear, can lead to a positive result; otherwise, I am right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
Lack of internal union also makes itself known in the increased suffering, magnification of anxiety, absence of motivation, and lack of pleasure that accompany indecision and uncertainty. The inability to decide among ten things, even when they are desirable, is equivalent to torment by all of them. Without clear, well-defined, and noncontradictory goals, the sense of positive engagement that makes life worthwhile is very difficult to obtain. Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress. The poorly integrated person is thus volatile and directionless—and this is only the beginning. Sufficient volatility and lack of direction can rapidly conspire to produce the helplessness and depression characteristic of prolonged futility. This is not merely a psychological state. The physical consequences of depression, often preceded by excess secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, are essentially indistinguishable from rapid aging (weight gain, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s).
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Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
“
There is a cruel illogic to the fact that, across the country, jail is now seen as a treatment option—and sometimes the lone treatment option—for disadvantaged citizens with mental illness. There is even a term for this response: compassionate arrest. Whereas one cannot fault Commander Westbrook or anyone else in her position for utilizing jail as an option for treatment when it is the only practical option, the fact that such a strategy exists throws our unequal and discriminatory treatment of the mentally ill into full relief. We use compassionate arrests only for people who suffer from lack of access to care for their psychiatric illnesses. We would never incarcerate people in order to obtain treatment for their cancer, or their asthma, or their diabetes.
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Christine Montross (Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration)
“
Sure, ‘Stay positive’ is a cliché; it’s the oldest advice in the book. But it’s the oldest advice for a reason – because it works.
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Saskia Lightstar (The Cancer Misfit: A Guide to Navigating Life After Treatment)
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The stab that I'd take with this situation the moment I felt ready I spoke to my mother lately when I'm old be fore I marrid by that I didnt what i expected from her instead she didnt notice the pain that i'd eexperianced through. To heal myself I forgave her,accepted my situation learn to live positive in it.In the side of forgive the group of men that raped me continueosly I decided to live my home town to start new life another town where I meet with my soul partner God provided with handsome suitable guy as I had issued with men it took God's misterious ways to connect us he's my friend and prayer partner God blessed us with two sons and one doughter, he
continue on helping us on raising our kids again i deed decision of raing our kids for myself by being house wife thanks God and my husband to be succed i 'm not perfect but i tried with God help and my closest friends,family it heppening.As i developed anger, sensitive and other unneeded personality throught my issue activities like body training,blogging,podcusting,reading bible and other booksk,being author,listing music special gospel help me to be in right position.The thing i can ask or say to other to other people is "Women Please love and protect your kids let stop this take quick action to help them if you see suspetious thing be close to them in a way that you manage to see if there's something not right heppen to them cause sometimes they will not tell you like on my case in any reason usualy strangers or rapist make them not say anything or your communication with them is not strong enough or any reason they make them shut To the community let protect each other be your sisters or brothers keeper on your neighborhood or in house
report the susptious act cause tomorrow will heppen in your house.Men you are the master protector not rapist stand your ground as God do trusted you with kids and women protect them stop taking advantage who ever does that.To those who like me the victim of rape I'm your girl to use alcohol,drugs and sex edict throw shame and unclean feeling is not solution it only running away act ask yourself that how long you'll runing away with cancer that eating you alive,face by allowing God to be your sim card, rica him and let him operate in you by rebuid you make you a new creation spiritual by acepting Jesus Christ as lord and your savior, healer and believe that God raised him from death in your special prayer with your mouth loud as confesion as I deed you'll be safe 100% in his arms like I am your story will change completly as mine finely no one knows you better dont allow situation explain you you beautiful handsome valueble God love you more than every one and he cares about you I love you'll take care of yourself youre the hero &herous.
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Nozipho N.Maphumulo
“
a noninvasive tumor. Stage 1—before the cancer spreads to the lymph nodes—is curable, though lots of stage 1 patients have mastectomies. Triple positive is good—this means the tumors respond to hormones—though triple-positive patients often go on a drug called tamoxifen, and everyone hates it because it makes you gain weight and zaps your sex drive. In stage 2, the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes; they sometimes feel swollen. Tatum checks under her arms again; she thought she felt some swelling the other night, but tonight, nothing. HER2-positive breast cancer is aggressive—treatment is effective but it nearly always includes chemotherapy. You can order a “cold cap” so your hair won’t fall out, but it’s expensive. What even
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Elin Hilderbrand (The Five-Star Weekend)
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Conversely, the (social and individual) positive effect sizes for homework and scholastic achievement, calcium intake and bone mass, and self-examination and extent of breast cancer are actually smaller than the effect size for the adverse association of aggressive and antisocial behavior with exposure to violent television and film portrayals. Thus, the media effect sizes stand up quite well when compared with those for other effects whether the focus is on undesired or desirable outcomes.
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Douglas A. Gentile (Media Violence and Children: A Complete Guide for Parents and Professionals, 2nd Edition (ADVANCES IN APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY))
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In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. (The joke among advocates of scientific medicine is “What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”) The work funded by NCCAM included studies on the effects of “distance healing”—including prayer—on HIV and glioblastoma (brain cancer), on coffee enemas as a palliative for cancer, and on magnetic mattress pads as cures for arthritis. None of these studies gave positive results; indeed, many of their results haven’t even been published.
”
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Jerry A. Coyne (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible)
“
As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell’s alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company’s 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, “We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy…Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.” Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies “equal time” to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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Switch over to the right channel in your life --- positive attitude, right kind of food, right people and positive conversations.
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Sanchita Pandey (Cancer to Cure)
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Researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn't cause cancer.)
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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It’s also not the case that attracting positive things is simply about keeping upbeat. I can’t say this strongly enough, but our feelings about ourselves are actually the most important barometer for determining the condition of our lives! In other words, being true to ourselves is more important than just trying to stay positive!
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Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
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Living more in harmony with who we truly are isn’t just forcing ourselves to repeat positive thoughts. It really means being and doing things that make us happy, things that arouse our passion and bring out the best in us, things that make us feel good—and it also means loving ourselves unconditionally. When we’re flowing in this way and feeling upbeat and energized about life, we’re in touch with our magnificence. When we can find that within us, things really start to get exciting, and we find synchronicities happening all around us.
”
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Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
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As late as April 2009, the IMF estimated that we would incur nearly $2 trillion in direct costs saving the financial system, but at the end of 2013, our financial programs were projected to generate a positive return for the taxpayer of more than $150 billion, enough to fund federal cancer research at current levels for the next twenty-five years. But many Americans just remember the initial characterization of the financial rescue as a handout. Jenni LeCompte once sent me a clip of CNN’s Erin Burnett interviewing a young activist from Occupy Wall Street, asking him if he knew that the Wall Street bailouts had been profitable for taxpayers.
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Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
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Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.
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John Brockman (This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress – A Groundbreaking Anthology of Essays from 175 Brilliant Minds (Edge Question))
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petri dish. Without any intervention, the cancer cells quadrupled within a few days—that’s how fast this cancer can grow. But when a little curcumin was added to the broth they were bathing in, the myeloma cells’ growth was either stunted or stopped altogether.30 As we’ve discovered, stopping cancer in a laboratory is one thing. What about in people? In 2009, a pilot study found that half (five out of ten) of the subjects with MGUS who had particularly high abnormal antibody levels responded positively to curcumin supplements.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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Of all the nuts studied in PREDIMED, the researchers found the greatest benefits associated with walnuts, particularly for preventing cancer deaths.15 People who ate more than three servings of walnuts per week appeared to cut their risk of dying from cancer in half. A review of the scientific literature concluded that “the far-reaching positive effects of a plant-based diet that includes walnuts may be the most critical message for the public.”16
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
“
Sometimes, the superstitions show the mysterious and specific ways to search, investigate, and realize the negative and positive results. I do not dig into the detail of the subject; however, in short, to define the concerns that I felt and feel yet. As criminals sell the drugs, to cause the health problems to innocent people; similarly, such criminals can adapt the various directions, to damage the humanity since many of us suffer from prostate and other cancer, which one may never consider that it is a natural consequence. One can always think that it became a victim of the criminals, who succeeded to victimize others. During the discussion with one of the urologists, whom I am under treatment, I expressed my concerns, referring to the examples as the Japanese scientist Minoru Shirota, created the mixture of skimmed milk with bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota, as Yakult, which develops health; conversely, one may prepare the beads of Helicobacter pylori, as homeopathy medicine that can cause cancer bacteria. The scientists should investigate such a matter, which is natural and unnatural since the world is under the criminals, and the evil-minded people, who can adopt such ways. It may seem as, an illusion; however, it can be the reality?
Is it possible that criminals and spy agencies can pass on and transmit the cancerous cells in any form, to their opponents or cancerous medical manufacturers can involve, for selling and financial benefits upon the human sufferings?
As far as one can realize, yes, it is possible, according to an illusion theory that, I have stated above insight of this passage. However, further study, investigation, and research should be on its way, for the concrete and significant outcome of that since the money-mongers can adopt all routes for their greediness and criminal motives, with the calibration of medical professionals.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
I’d like to start a worldwide movement to implement practices of culturally appropriate Life Honoring Celebrations. Not to replace funerals but to augment them. Personally, I think it’s impractical at best and pointless at worst to sing somebody’s praises when they’re dead. Perhaps saying lovely things about them at funerals helps us mourn. Saying the same things to them while alive may give us a jumpstart on that mourning. But why not use their dying as an opportunity to grow ourselves, to bring us into closer proximity with the reality of death, to face our fears and step willfully into our deepest hearts to speak the truth of what someone means to us? Why not tell them when they’re alive? Why not let them see some of the difference they made in the world around them? Even the most troubled and maligned person usually has positively impacted somebody. No matter how difficult anyone’s life has been they usually create some ripples of positive change. And I believe that every person longs to know that. We long to see it. To know that our existence does not all come to naught in the end. That efforts large and small have impacts seen and unseen. It serves each of us to have tangible proof of this before we pass. Life Honoring Celebrations should be every human’s birthright. Thank goodness Tracy got to receive hers. Just in time.
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Frederick Marx (At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer)
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physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
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Jessica Lourey (Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction)
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The Secrets To A Healthy And Nutritional Diet
Do you eat fast food often? Do you tend to snack on unhealthy packaged foods and lack a proper amount of fruits and vegetables? These things can lead to obesity, depression, and other serious disorders common in today's society! Read on to find out how you can change your nutrition to facilitate a better life!
One tip when thinking about nutrition is nutrient density. How rich in nutrients is the food you're eating - not by weight, but by calorie? You would be surprised to learn, for example, that when measured by CALORIES, a vegetable like broccoli is surprisingly high in protein - comparable, calorie for calorie, to the amount of protein found in red meats. But of course you can eat far more broccoli for the same amount of calories, which also provides fiber, vitamin C, and folic acid.
Make sure your kids are not learning their health facts about food from food ads on television or otherwise. Make sure that they get what they need with a healthy diet rich in produce and lean meats and dairies and provide them with the correct information if they ask you.
One thing a lot of people think is that nutrition is all about food. You also want to take into account how your body uses the food you eat. You want to make sure you regularly exercise as well as to eat the right kinds of food, your body will thank you for this.
When considering nutrition for a child, it is important to make it a positive and entertaining experience. This is important because your child needs nutrients, and they also need a reason why they should eat healthy food. Some ideas would be to cut a sandwich into fun shapes, or use unique colored vegetables.
You will want to consider pesticides and their effect on your food. They are generally portrayed as detrimental. But if you talk with farmers, you may come to a more nuanced view. For instance, you may hear that some fungicides are necessary; that a healthy crop cannot be produced without them, and that none of the chemical is retained on the produce you buy.
Try to include more tomatoes in your meals. The biggest benefit from tomatoes is their high concentration of lycopene. Lycopene is a powerful antioxidant that plays a role in the prevention of cancer cell formation. Research has shown that tomatoes also have potential benefits in the prevention of heart disease and lowering high cholesterol.
A good piece of advice is to eat a little before you attend a Thanksgiving dinner. If you go to a Thanksgiving dinner on an empty stomach, you're more likely to overindulge. Choose to eat some fresh fruit before you arrive for the dinner, and you will be less apt to eat far more than you should.
Hopefully now you can see how easy it is to improve your nutrition and reap the health benefits it provides. If you don't want to suffer from depression and obesity, stop eating the fast food now and apply the advice by dropping by there rosholistic.com you've just read in this article to improve your diet and improve your life.
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morphogenicfieldtechnique
“
THE LEWINSKY PROCEDURE: A STRATEGY GUIDE FOR MINIMIZING POLITICAL SCANDAL Deny -The necessary first stage, where you question the accuracy of the facts. It will take time for all the scandalous details to come out, and if you’re careful or lucky, they may never come out. Deny everything until the point that the facts against you can be substantiated. Delay -Take every action possible to stall, postpone, impede, procrastinate, and filibuster. The longer the time between the initial news of the scandal and the resolution of the scandal, the better. Diminish -Once the facts against you have been substantiated, either minimize the nature of the scandal or its impact against you. “At this point, what difference does it make?” Debunk -Have a helpful news organization or advocacy group develop a useful counter-narrative that explains away the scandal or contradicts the facts or generally does something to get progressives back on your side. “Explanatory journalism” is a great help here. Distract -Change the conversation by talking about something else. It doesn’t matter what that might be, because there’s always something else more important, even if it’s reminding people to drink more water. Suggest that the scandal itself is a distraction from the real issues. Deflect -When in doubt, blame the Republicans. All administrative failures can be blamed on the failures of the prior administration. All political failures can be blamed on Republican legislation or Republican intransigence in not passing progressive legislation which would have fixed the problem. All personal failures can be excused by either bringing up the example of a Republican who did something similar, or by pointing out that whatever was done wasn’t as bad as serving divorce papers on your wife when she’s in the hospital with cancer, or invading Iraq. Divide -Point out that the scandal is being driven by the most extreme Republicans, and that moderates aren’t to blame. This won’t help you with moderates that much, but it will give the moderates another reason not to like the extremists, and vice versa, and this can only be positive. Deploy -Get friends and allies to talk about your positive virtues in public, without reference to the scandal. If the scandal comes up, have them complain about the politics of personal destruction. Demonize -Attribute malign intentions to the conservatives trying to promote the scandal. This approach should also include special prosecutors, judges, and anyone else who is involved in the scandal to one degree or another. Defenestrate -When necessary, shove someone under the bus. Try not to make this a habit, or you won’t have anyone around to deploy. The target for defenestration can be small (rogue employees in the Cincinnati regional office) or large (Cabinet secretary) but it needs to be someone who won’t scream overly much as they sail out the window. ❄ ❄ ❄
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Curtis Edmonds (Snowflake's Chance: The 2016 Campaign Diary of Justin T. Fairchild, Social Justice Warrior)
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Many of us are not aware of our optimistic tendencies.… Data clearly shows that most people overestimate their prospects for professional achievement; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; miscalculate their likely life span; expect to be healthier than their peers; hugely underestimate their likelihood of divorce, cancer, and unemployment; and are confident overall that their future lives will be better than those their parents put up with. This is known as the optimism bias—the inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events. —The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain
(TALI SHAROT, PANTHEON BOOKS, 2011)
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Bob Knight (The Power of Negative Thinking: An Unconventional Approach to Achieving Positive Results)
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growing only crops was not. Worst was growing up on a poultry farm, which was associated with nearly three times the odds of developing blood cancer.53 Exposure to cattle and pigs has also been associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.54 A 2003 study by University of California researchers revealed that nearly three-quarters of human subjects tested positive for exposure to the bovine leukemia virus, likely through the consumption of meat and dairy products.55 Approximately 85 percent of U.S. dairy herds have tested positive for the virus (and
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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Weston retained her reputation and position as one of the prominent medieval scholars of her time. She continued working until her death, which occurred at the age of 77 on September 29, 1928, after complications following cancer surgery. Her obituary in the Times included not just a mention of her work, but of her general positive attitude in the face of critics, noting that, "her charming personality and her great sense of humour won her the enduring affection of a host of friends all over the world...
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Jessie Laidlay Weston (From Ritual to Romance [with Biographical Introduction] (Cosimo Classics Mythology and Folklore))
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a definitive human breast carcinogen.18 In 2014, it clarified its position by stating that, regarding breast cancer, no amount of alcohol is safe.19 But what about drinking “responsibly”? In 2013, scientists published a compilation of more than one hundred studies on breast cancer and light drinking (up to one alcoholic beverage a day). The researchers had found a small but statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk even among women who had at most one drink per day (except, perhaps, for red wine—see box below). They estimated
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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than those who ate less.135 The quantity of phytoestrogens found in just a single cup of soy milk136 may reduce the risk of breast cancer returning by 25 percent.137 The improvement in survival for those eating more soy foods was found both in women whose tumors were responsive to estrogen (estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer) and those whose tumors were not (estrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer). This also held true for both young women and older women.138 In one study, for example, 90 percent of the breast cancer patients
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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And yet, there can be no bigger teacher, than life itself. Between 1998 and 2003, when the Scorpio was being developed, Pawan’s wife Mamta was diagnosed with breast cancer. At such a time, it would be natural to demand more time, more attention, from her husband. But Mamta was made of tougher stuff. She knew how crucial the Scorpio project was… A chance for Pawan to show the stuff he was made of. “Focus on your work, I can take care of myself,” she said to her husband. Through painful surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, Mamta remained positive. Neither Pawan nor the kids saw her moaning and groaning, in pain or distress. I don’t believe in or use too many buzzwords, and when I make any speech, what I hear as a compliment is that your speech was beautifully simple. “It is not that I was in denial but sharing my pain would make my family miserable… what would be the point? It was my battle, that I had to fight.
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Rashmi Bansal (Shine Bright)
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What about your parents? Where are they? Dead or something?” “Yeah.” “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” I hold up a hand to stop her apology. “It’s okay. My mom died of ovarian cancer when I was a baby. I don’t remember her. And I never knew my dad. He didn’t stick around.” Uncle Paul says my dad split 2 seconds after the pregnancy test came back positive, and that it was a good decision for all of us—especially me. Windy’s eyebrows lift high on her face, and her lips turn down. “Lucy, I’m so sorry. You’re like an orphan.” I laugh. “Stop. Please. I’m not an orphan.” I’ve thought of myself as a genius, a savant, and a freak, but never an orphan. Nana has always been there, and Uncle Paul, too. “I’m fine. I don’t need you to collect canned goods for me or give me a coat for winter. I have a family.
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Stacy McAnulty (The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl)
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That is my goal: a healthy life. Not a sprint to ketone positive urine tests. The key to sustainability is the LONG GAME.
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Annette Bosworth (Anyway You Can: Doctor Bosworth Shares Her Mom's Cancer Journey)
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Dani recalled reading the findings of a major study—that married men live longer than unmarried men; married men are better protected from heart disease, dementia, depression, even experience more positive outcomes from cancer. And a widower was twice as likely to die within a year of his wife than a widow was. Married women, on the other hand, had a decreased life expectancy, decreased even further for those with children. Marriage and children, the two most powerful cultural currents for women, the two things they’re trained from birth to desire more than anything else, were, in fact, destroying them.
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Ainslie Hogarth (Normal Women)
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He had no property, no position, no future, nothing except the few cubic centimeters inside his skull—but the cancer and its operatives wanted that too. If they couldn’t own it, they would destroy it with surgical precision and scientific savagery.
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Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
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Dubbed depressive realism, Alloy and Abramson’s work has inspired other, often quite sophisticated, experimental demonstrations of ways that low mood can lead to better, clearer thinking. Compared to subjects in a positive mood, subjects who were put in a negative mood (by watching a ten-minute film about death from cancer) produced more effective persuasive messages on a standardized topic such as raising student fees or aboriginal land rights. Follow-up analyses found that the key reason the sadder people were more persuasive was that their arguments were richer in concrete detail. If people who are in a sad mood sometimes assess the world quite accurately, people in a “normal,” healthy mood may be less in touch with reality. At least some data suggest that people in a normal mood can be prone to positive illusions, overconfidence, and blindness to faults.
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Jonathan Rottenberg (The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic)
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Top Skills Australia Wants for the Global Talent Visa
The Global Talent Visa (subclass 858) is one of Australia’s most prestigious visa programs, designed to attract highly skilled professionals who can contribute to the country’s economy and innovation landscape. Australia is looking for exceptional talent across various sectors to support its economic growth, technological advancements, and cultural development. If you’re considering applying for the Global Talent Visa, understanding the skills in demand will help you position yourself as a strong candidate.
In this blog, we’ll outline the top skills and sectors Australia prioritizes for the Global Talent Visa, and why these skills are so valuable to the country’s future development.
1. Technology and Digital Innovation
Australia is rapidly embracing digital transformation across industries, and the technology sector is one of the highest priority areas for the Global Talent Visa. Skilled professionals in cutting-edge technologies are highly sought after to fuel innovation and help Australia stay competitive in the global economy.
Key Tech Skills in Demand:
Cybersecurity: With increasing cyber threats globally, Australia needs experts who can safeguard its digital infrastructure. Cybersecurity professionals with expertise in network security, data protection, and ethical hacking are in high demand.
Software Development & Engineering: Australia’s digital economy thrives on skilled software engineers and developers. Professionals who are proficient in programming languages like Python, Java, and C++, or who specialize in areas such as cloud computing, DevOps, and systems architecture, are highly valued.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are transforming industries ranging from healthcare to finance. Experts in AI algorithms, natural language processing, deep learning, and neural networks are in demand to help drive this technology forward.
Blockchain & Cryptocurrency: Blockchain technology is revolutionizing sectors like finance, supply chains, and data security. Professionals with expertise in blockchain development, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency applications can play a key role in advancing Australia's digital economy.
2. Healthcare and Biotechnology
Australia has a robust and expanding healthcare system, and the country is heavily investing in medical research and biotechnology to meet the needs of its aging population and to drive innovation in health outcomes. Professionals with advanced skills in biotechnology, medtech, and pharmaceuticals are crucial to this push.
Key Healthcare & Bio Skills in Demand:
Medical Research & Clinical Trials: Australia is home to a growing number of research institutions that focus on new treatments, vaccines, and therapies. Researchers and professionals with experience in clinical trials, molecular biology, and drug development can contribute to the ongoing advancement of Australia’s healthcare system.
Biotechnology & Genomics: Experts in biotechnology, particularly those working in genomics, gene editing (e.g., CRISPR), and personalized medicine, are highly sought after. Australia is investing heavily in biotech innovation, especially for treatments related to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and genetic disorders.
MedTech Innovation: Professionals developing the next generation of medical technologies—ranging from diagnostic tools and medical imaging to wearable health devices and robotic surgery systems—are in high demand. If you have experience in health tech commercialization, you could find significant opportunities in Australia.
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global talent visa australia
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The drug had so many debilitating and lethal side effects that FDA, in an uncharacteristic act of civil disobedience against NIAID’s diminutive dictator, issued a black box warning. Nevertheless, desperate HIV-infected Americans rushed like doomed lemmings to take the drug. In 2010, FDA issued a statement that ddI can cause potentially a fatal liver disease called non-cirrhotic portal hypertension.126 Even with its demonstrated toxicity, Dr. Fauci used CRI parallel-track process to bypass the usual controls, to win approval for use of ddI in pregnant mothers who test positive for HIV. A 2019 study [Hleyhel et al., Environ Mol Mutagen (2019)127] found that ddI accounted for 16 percent of prescriptions for infected mothers and 30 percent of the cancers in their children. In 1996, Dr. Fauci used his expedited fast track to break another record by winning FDA approval for Merck’s HIV antiviral Crixivan; this time it took only six weeks.128 Dr. Fauci achieved that feat by allowing Merck to run Crixivan through a skeleton CRI process on a tiny cohort of ninety-seven volunteers in three groups, thereby winning the swiftest approval in history: forty-two days. That approval prompted open revolt by the AIDS community, which felt betrayed when Merck hiked up
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Portenoy’s initial reaction to Kanner was then the mainstream position in medicine. If someone was in severe pain with a bad back, you tried to fix their back. If a cancer patient was in pain, you focused on treating the cancer. Pain was just a manifestation of an underlying problem. But Kanner was part of a group who believed that approach was backward—that if someone was in pain, for whatever reason, you should treat the pain. For Portenoy, that first meeting with his mentor was an epiphany. He became convinced that, because medicine was thinking of pain as a symptom rather than a problem in and of itself, his profession was letting patients suffer needlessly. Doctors needed to take pain seriously, which meant, Portenoy believed, that they should not be afraid to prescribe opioids.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering)
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Is organic cotton the future of sustainable development?
With the increase in climate change and global warming, each step taken by us matters, be it even by transforming our cotton closet into an organic cotton closet.
We are living in a time, where each step will either lead to an immense increase in global warming or will lead to the protection of our Mother Earth. So why not make our actions count and take a step by protecting our nature by switching to organic clothing?!
As we know, the fashion industry is one of the largest industry of today, in which the cotton textiles lead the line together with the cotton manufacture setting them as the highest-ranked in the fashion industry. These pieces of regular cotton those are constructed into garments leads to 88% more wastage of water from our resources.
Whereas Organic Cotton that has been made from natural seeds and handpicked for maintaining the purity of fibres; uses 1,982 fewer gallons of water compared to regular cotton.
Gallons of water used by:
Regular cotton: 2168 gallons
Organic Cotton: 186 gallons
Due to increase in market size of the fashion industry every year along with the cotton industry; regular cotton is handpicked by workers to keep up with the increase in demand for the regular cotton and because these crops are handpicked it leads to various damages and crises such as:
Damage of fibres: As regular cotton is grown as mono-crop it destroys the soil quality, that exceeds the damage when handpicked by the farmers, leading to also the destruction of fibres because of the speed and time limit ordered.
Damage of crops: Regular cotton leads to damage of crops when it is handpicked, as not much attention is paid while plucking it in bulk, due to which all the effort, time and resources used to cultivate the crops drain-out to zero.
Water wastage: The amount of clean water being depleted to produce regular cotton is extreme that might lead to a water crisis. The clean water when used for manufacturing turns into toxic water that is disposed into freshwater bodies, causing a hazardous impact on the people deprived of this natural resource.
Wastage of resources: When all the above-mentioned factors are ignored by the manufactures and the farmers, it directly leads to the waste of resources, as the number of resources used to produce the regular cotton is way high in number when compared to the results at the end.
Regular cotton along with these damages also demands to use chemical dyes for their further process, that is not only harmful to our body but is also very dangerous to the workers exposed to it, as these chemicals lead to many health problems like earring aids, lunch cancer, skin cancer, eczema and many more,
other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long
other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long
Know More about synthetic dyes on ‘Why synthetic dye stands for the immortality done to Nature?’
Organic cotton, when compared to regular cotton, brings a radical positive change to the environment. To manufacture, just one t-shirt, regular cotton uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, 7% pesticides and 2,700 litres of water, when compared to this, organic cotton uses 62% less energy than regular Cotton.
Bulk Organic Cotton Fabric Manufacturer:
Suvetah is one of the leading bulk organic cotton fabric manufacturer in India.
Suvetah is GOTS certified sustainable fabric manufacturer in Organic Cotton Fabric, Linen Fabric and Hemp Fabric.
We are also manufacturer of other fabrics like Denim, Kala Cotton Fabric, Ahimsa Silk Fabric, Ethical Recycled Cotton Fabric, Banana Fabric, Orange Fabric, Bamboo Fabric, Rose Fabric, Khadi Fabric etc.
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Ashish Pathania
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I recently fell victim to a bogus Bitcoin investment scheme that defrauded me of $320,000. This added a great deal of stress to my already challenging health concerns, since I was also dealing with the cost of cancer surgery. I spent hours investigating and speaking with other victims in an attempt to get my money back, and it was through a Google post that I learned about Wizard James Recovery's stellar reputation. I just learned about Wizard James Recovery's exceptional reputation after countless hours of study and advice-seeking from other victims.Because of their positive client testimonials and good recovery record, I made the decision to get in touch with them. That this would be the turning point in my battle against bitcoin theft was unknown to me. Their knowledgeable staff helped me get my missing bitcoin back. Despite the complexity of the process, Wizard James Recovery's dedication to using the newest technologies made sure that everything worked perfectly. I strongly advise anyone who has been duped by cryptocurrency to use their services. For assistance, contact Wizardjamesrecovery@usa.com OR Call/WA Number +447418367204
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Arie Wismer
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Whether it’s the conviction that one can “manifest” their way out of financial hardship, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, stave off cancer with positive vibes, or transform an abusive relationship to a glorious one with hope alone, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency. While magical thinking is an age-old quirk, overthinking feels distinct to the modern era—a product of our innate superstitions clashing with information overload, mass loneliness, and a capitalistic pressure to “know” everything under the sun.
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Amanda Montell (The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality)
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If you’ve had breast cancer or are at increased risk for estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer (ERPB) and are seeking relief for menopausal symptoms, your doctor may recommend to you a “SERM” such as tamoxifen or raloxifene. SERM stands for selective estrogen receptor modulator, and these medications work by blocking the effects of estrogen in certain tissues and providing the benefits of estrogen in others.
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Mary Claire Haver (The New Menopause: Navigating Your Path Through Hormonal Change with Purpose, Power, and Facts)