Kathi's Blog - Kathi Casey, Author, Baby Boomer Health and Wellness Coach, Amazon International Bestselling Author

 A guest post by Carolyn Dean, MD, ND

Several clients have asked me about the recent bad press about mammography lately, so I asked my friend Dr. Carolyn Dean to write a guest post for us and shed some light on the difference between mammography and thermography. Here’s her post:

“I remember speaking at the American Medical Women’s Association and getting into an argument with a woman radiologist. I was asking, and quite politely I thought, why she didn’t consider Thermography a safer tool to screen for breast cancer than radiating the body with mammogram X-rays.

You would have thought I killed her first-born…and maybe that was her fear. Taking away her livelihood and her favorite tool.

We have known for over a decade that Mammograms do NOT save lives. Now in the past couple of years researchers have finally come to recognize that mammograms can cause cancer with their cumulative ionizing radiation.

So, what’s a girl to do? Why are we still getting our breasts smashed and irradiated with cancer causing X-rays? Good question.

My advice?  Find a good Thermography practitioner and get periodic testing. Even if you have to travel to do it!

I’m serious.

While in LA last month I visited with my friend, Dr. Galina Migalko, a medical doctor who is skilled in Medical Thermography and Diagnostic Ultrasonography.

Thermography is a painless, non invasive, adjunctive state of the art clinical test without any exposure to radiation and is used as part of an early detection program which gives women of all ages the opportunity to increase their chances of detecting breast disease at an early stage.

One of the reasons Mammography doesn’t save lives is that it is too late when it detects tumors. But Thermography may detect breast cancer years earlier than Mammography. Looking through computerized full body Thermography scans I was amazed at what could be discerned about a patient’s health.

Instead of chopping up the body into individual parts and doing testing, a doctor who is trained in Thermography looks at a full picture of the body and can then put all the pieces together to create an overall diagnosis. If something is found on Thermography, they can immediately use Ultrasound to learn more if needed. This is far superior to having to wait and worry for weeks to do follow up testing on something that may have shifted in the meantime.

Diagnostic Medical Thermography and Ultrasound are complimentary tests. When using these two diagnostic tests together the diagnostic sensitivity goes up to over 95%.

And how much more sane than the latest “fad” of doing full body CT Scans with radiation doses equivalent to hundreds of chest X-rays. Thermography is unique in that it shows physiology or “what’s happening” in the tissues as opposed to CT’s, MRI’s and other static pictures of simple anatomy. It is the only imaging test that can show pain, inflammation, lymphatic congestion, and more.

This testing is not just for women! Thermography can detect early signs of arthritis, neck and back pain, dental infections, headaches and sinus infections, immune dysfunction, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), digestive disorders, bursitis, ligament or muscle tears, nerve problems, as well as screen for strokes and detect cancer in the very early stages.”

For more information from Dr. Carolyn Dean, visit her fabulous blog HERE!

If you’re in the Berkshires, Awaken Healing Arts offers Thermography testing by appointment.

Best of Health,

Kathi

 Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there! My wish is that you will enjoy a lovely night’s sleep with one of today’s remedies.

Are you one of the 20 million Americans who have trouble sleeping at night? Seems it has become the norm today for those of us over 40 to have trouble sleeping. Everyone I talk with these days is finding it difficult to get a restful night’s sleep. 

Sleep deprivation can raise your blood pressure, and according to Drs. Oz and Michael Roizen, noted experts in health science, insomnia can also cause memory problems, weight gain and headaches. 

Have faith, there are easy solutions that work, and you don't need a second mortgage to pay for them. I'm sure one of these will help you find those zzz’s, get your REM sleep, and best of all return your heart rate and brain waves to normal! Here are a couple of simple solutions that have helped me and many of my fellow Boomers, give them a try and see for yourself!

• Magnesium deficiencies have been linked to sleeping disorders, anxiety, irritability, and restless leg syndrome. Make sure your daily vitamins include the recommended 400 milligrams of Magnesium. Eating foods rich in magnesium like legumes, dark leafy green vegetables, wheat bran, almonds, cashews, and whole grains as part of your daily healthy eating habits can help reduce your insomnia. And because it’s difficult to get enough daily magnesium from food, I supplement with a product called Natural Calm (325 mg. of magnesium), from the Natural Vitality company. Natural Calm is well recommended and you can get it at health food stores, Whole Foods, and I get it at my local organic grocery store.
• Melatonin is a natural sleep aid that's very popular and one that you may have heard of, it's a hormone that occurs naturally in our bodies.
• Anise tea has been shown to bring on sleep. Anise tastes like licorice, which I don’t care for, but if you like the flavor of black licorice, give it a try. Mix 12 oz. of boiling water with one teaspoon of anise seeds and let it simmer for about 15 minutes. Then strain and drink warm with a teaspoon of honey before bed. The honey also has sleep inducing qualities – there we go, multitasking again!

Let me know how you make out!

Best of Health,

Kathi

 I just tried this tea and it’s delicious!

Peel an organic tangerine, taking care to retain the white pith. Let the peel dry naturally, overnight. Insecticide sprays are widely applied over citrus crops, so organic fruits are best. In fact, anytime you need the peel or zest of a citrus fruit, it’s a good idea to go organic. If you don’t use an organic tangerine, make sure you wash it thoroughly.

In the morning, boil a cup of pure water, tear off a couple of small pieces of the dried tangerine peel, place them in the cup of hot water and steep for 2-3 minutes. I like to sweeten mine with a little raw honey.

You can also make a pot of this tea and then cool it, for a lovely cool citrusy delight after a day out in the hot sun!

Dried tangerine peel will last for at least two months if kept in a dry sealed container and stored in a dark, cool place. The skin inside tangerine peels contains large amounts of hesperidin. Hesperidin is a flavonoid responsible for lowering cholesterol and blood pressure. The highest concentrations of other healthy compounds such as tangeretin and nobiletin are also contained in the skin of the peel.

A Canadian study publicized in 2004 showed that tangerine peel has 20 times the antioxidants of the juice, and helps lower LDL (bad) cholesterol. According to Master Lin of Spring Forest QiQong, the peel of an organic tangerine also helps relieve stress, detoxify the liver, and balance blood sugar. Nice!

In another study, published in the May 2011 “Diabetes,” a journal of the American Diabetes Association, researchers observed that a flavonoid called nobiletin, found in tangerines, significantly reduced the risk of metabolic syndrome, and almost completely prevented obesity in a group of rats eating a Western diet high in fat and sugar. According to the researchers, nobiletin inhibits the genes responsible for producing fat.

Ok, so you’re not a rat; but why not get these healthy compounds into your diet? You might lose some waistline or lower that LDL or blood pressure... Pop a tangerine skin in with your blender smoothie several times a week. Alternately, a powder can be made by drying the pith inside the peel of a tangerine, which can then be added to your smoothie, or even your morning oatmeal. And you get to eat the rest of the tangerine – woo woo, more vitamin C! As the cliché goes, “good, and good for you”!

Best of Health,

Kathi

Baby Boomers are now growing their own organic vegetables and purchasing more organic food than any generation before them. This is good news for our earth! With all the bad press that Monsanto and their "Frankenfood" have generated lately, many of us are afraid to eat just about anything that's conventionally grown these days. In fact, I'm planning to turn my entire front yard into a vegetable garden this year! Growing our own organic greens and tomatoes assures us that we'll be eating the nutrients that our bodies need, without added chemicals. 

I wonder if perhaps one of the reasons that so many of us Baby Boomers are planting our own gardens again is that we remember what real food tastes like! It's not just nostalgia - everything did taste better when we were kids. It was real food.

If you are going to plant your own this year, remember that gardening can be tough on the body. It's important to stretch before you start your gardening project, and repeat afterward, to avoid back pain from stooping over your plants, digging and raking. One of my favorite back exercises is a slightly different take on the yoga pose, Bridge. Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, about hip distance apart. Bring your arms up toward the ceiling and clasp your hands together. Inhale as you tuck your tailbone in and slowly arch your back up into a strong Bridge pose, then push your arms toward the ceiling and exhale your back slowly down to the floor, one vertebra at a time. When you do it this way, it's easier to really feel one vertebra at a time. Repeat three or four times before gardening and then again afterword and your back will thank you!

Best of Health,

Kathi  

I love dark chocolate – In fact, it’s my preferred dessert. Cakes, pies, brownies, or other candy don’t have any appeal for me at all, but a lovely piece of dark chocolate satisfies my urge for dessert. Apparently, Katherine Hepburn and I have that in common! I recently read a quote of hers where she credited her thin build to "a lifetime of chocolate."

A new study from researchers at the University of California, San Diego, published in the March 26, 2012 Archives of Internal Medicine, suggests that eating chocolate doesn't cause weight gain. How cool is that! These scientists wanted to test the theory that eating small amounts of chocolate on a regular basis doesn’t cause us to gain weight. I’m not sure why they wanted to test that, but I’m glad they did! Researchers studied 1,000 overweight men and women and found that those who ate chocolate most often tended to consume more calories overall, including saturated fat, but weighed five to seven pounds less than people who didn't eat any chocolate. This held true regardless of age, gender or amount of exercise reported by the chocolate-eaters. How often the participants ate chocolate seemed to make the difference, rather than how much they ate.

We have all read the many studies in recent years which prove that dark chocolate is a source of polyphenols (antioxidants), and the fat it contains, stearic acid, doesn't affect cholesterol levels, that the flavonoids in dark chocolate may help reduce the risks of heart disease. Now this new study shows that a small amount of dark chocolate, eaten regularly, doesn’t make us gain weight! This is good news for people like me who love a little desert after dinner! Think I’ll have me an ounce now!

Best of Health,

Kathi