All posts by Jacqueline
The Evolution of Medicine Summit
Do you know what medicine will look like in 5-10 years and how it will affect you?
You should!
40 trusted world leaders in health!
Free online event!
Medicine is evolving to solve the modern epidemics of chronic disease, such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and a range of autoimmune diseases. Our summit intends to not only shine a light on the work of those visionaries and innovators leading this evolution, but also set a unique vision for a more evolved healthcare system. This vision is patient-centric, empowered, proactive and participatory.
We’ve created separate tracks for health consumers and health professionals for the Evolution of Medicine Summit. However, please feel free to enjoy all of the information no matter your profession or state of health!
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New research sheds light on mysterious fibromyalgia pain
By Karen Weintraub
Special for USA TODAY
Fibromyalgia affects 1% to 5% of Americans, mainly women, but until recently, scientists had no idea what might be causing its severe and mysterious pains. For decades, doctors told patients their agony was imaginary, the result of emotional hysteria, not a physical ailment.
But this year, researchers finally began to get a handle on the condition.
“What’s happened is in 2013 there’s been this absolute explosion of papers,” says neurologist Anne Louise Oaklander at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “The whole view on this has shifted.”
Oaklander published two studies this year showing that half or more of the cases of fibromyalgia are really a little-known condition affecting the nerves. People with this small-fiber neuropathy get faulty signals from tiny nerves all over the body, including internal organs, causing an odd constellation of symptoms from pain to sleep and digestive problems that overlap with symptoms of fibromyalgia.
Neuroscientist Frank Rice and a team based at Albany Medical College also discovered that there are excessive nerve fibers lining the blood vessels of the skin of fibromyalgia patients – removing any doubt that the condition is physically real.
These fibers in the skin can sense blood flow and control the dilation and constriction of vessels to regulate body temperature, Rice says, as well as direct nutrients to muscles during exercise. Women have more of these fibers than men, he says, perhaps explaining why they are much more likely to get fibromyalgia.
“Blood vessel nerve fibers are an important target that haven’t been in our line of thinking to date in chronic pain conditions,” says Rice, now president and chief scientist at Integrated Tissue Dynamics LLC, a biotechnology research company in Rensselaer, N.Y.
In recent years, scans of patients with fibromyalgia have revealed brain changes associated with pain, but the new research suggests these are a symptom rather than the cause of the condition. Read the full article…
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Sugarplum Visions and Coping During the Holidays
Thursday, June 21, 2007
By: Eve Reddin Lennon, CPCC
This is the time of the year when we find ourselves surrounded, if not bombarded, by a multitude of media messages suggesting what we should be doing for the holidays and how we should be doing it. These messages are designed to conjure up sugarplum visions of beautiful, festive, picture perfect, storybook holidays with smiling families and all the trimmings that will surely bring us all peace and joy and incredible holiday happiness. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Hollywood movie, or even our own romanticized memories of tradition-soaked holidays past, these images are seductively appealing—but the problem is that they aren’t real. They are fictionalized, idealized versions of the holidays.
Consider for a moment the expectations we have placed on ourselves to make our own holidays fit these perfect, but imaginary and unattainable images in our heads. Way beyond our genuine and heartfelt desires for the Season’s Greetings, Merry Christmases, and Happy Hanukahs, we enter the season believing we are somehow obligated to follow a set of unwritten rules prescribing just what and how much we should be cramming into a few short weeks: “Deck the Halls!” (Inside and outside, upstairs and down until everything glows, sparkles, or twinkles, and smells like pinecones and spice.) Or, “It’s the season to open your hearts and be generous” (meaning shop till you drop, wrap it all up, and defer payment until January when you open the bills and go into stress overload). It is also the season to “Gather your family” (whether you want to be with them or not,)to be the perfect hostess, to set a beautiful table and serve up at least one feast (dust off those cookbooks, shine up the silver, polish the crystal), and of course, to dress up, put a smile on your face, and attend all the parties, functions and festivities within a 250 mile radius.
Somewhere deep in our own heads is a list longer than Santa’s—of all the things we believe we need to or should do to make the season merry and bright. But the fact is that in order to do so we would each have to be a Martha Stewart clone with a staff of forty and the stamina of the Energizer bunny.
Wow. It is a recipe for exhaustion for nearly anyone, but for those of us with chronic illnesses like FM, it can be a recipe for a holiday disaster that results in unrelenting pain, brain fogs, and that deeply rooted, energy leeching fatigue that leaves us incapable of functioning; feeling isolated and depressed. Continue reading…
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Love, Gratitude and Dad
Those of us living with chronic pain and illness know all too intimately the suggestion to find the good in our circumstances. We pour over positive affirmations and self-help books, journal, meditate, bang our heads on the wall and stomp our feet. We ask, scream out, the question: ‘Why? Why me? What does it mean?’
And we do find it in ourselves to persevere and lift above our experience. Become bigger than it alone. We find strength we never knew we had, compassion and empathy for others and the vision of a life better. I’m not alone, and have moved through all of these at different times, and continue to.
How is it we might find our deepest wish in life fulfilled as, by what might seem, the direct result of our circumstances. And which may not have happened otherwise? How do we resolve that? And does it really matter that we do?
I’ve been doing a lot of reading these last few weeks – I’m on vacation! I’ve made my way through The Hidden Messages in Water
I see a thread weaving through them all. Threads of Love and Gratitude, Vibration and Resonating. This last week (the Universe, my God, whom or whatever you might call it) has shown me an abundance of each of these. In more ways than I can write about here.
I have wanted a lot of things in life. Some things really badly. A job, a raise, an education, to dance…but there is only one thing I could describe as a Wish. And that was the Wish to have a (loving) relationship with my father. It’s a whole other story (maybe) that we were separated when I was very young – too young for me to have a conscious remembrance of him.
I always had something of him with me though. And like when you squint at the night sky to see that flicker of a star, so was my hope to reunite with him. Just that glimmer. It was enough for me as a little girl and has remained enough for me throughout adulthood.
I was recently blessed when that glimmer broke through a dark sky and my father, mon père, reached out to me when word had reached him of my current state of health.
So the question is, does it matter that after all this time it took these circumstances to connect us? My answer is a resounding ‘No!’ There are no needed explanations. No questions I need to ask or have answered. All that matters is ‘now’, the present moment. And that we have connected.
I believe the love and gratitude I’ve been nurturing within myself has laid the foundation for this moment. And could those vibrations and (well) wishes I’ve made have had anything to do with the unfolding of recent events? Maybe…
Our past stories may unfold over time, but it’s our future story that we’re now writing.
Je t’ai toujours aimé mon père et toujours!
Blessings,
Jacqueline
Have you experienced unexpected love and gratitude through your experience of chronic illness? I would love to hear your stories of serendipity, synchronicity or (well) wishing in the comments below .