CASTOR OIL HAS MANY USES

Gladys Taylor McGarey, M.D., MD(H), a pioneer in holistic medicine since 1957, uses castor oil concepts in her consulting practice in Living Medicine.

When Doctors Alyce and Elmer Green researched the field of biofeedback the statement "thoughts are things" and the power of visualization found it added new life to this power of intention as usable tools in the field of medicine. It talked about the ability of the body to regenerate itself. When Robert O. Becker came out with his book "The Body Electric" he described the ability of living animals to re-grow limbs through the use of low electrical stimuli. It made the field of medicine comprehend the extent to which our skin is a vital organ for assimilating and eliminating nutrients and toxins. It is now accepted and proven that dermal patches on the skin are useful in the science of medicine.

Dr. McGarey tells of a friend who had been diagnosed with breast cancer requiring the full gamut of conventional therapeutic modalities. At her first injection of Taxol, she asked the therapist what Taxol was made from and was delighted to be told that the active ingredient was from the yew tree. Dr. McGarey's parents (both medical doctors) had used and applied castor oil packs in their practice and was familiar with the many uses of castor oil as medical missionaries in India. Childhood memories from her parents about castor oil came back. It had been called "The palm of Christ." She began visualizing tiny palms of Christ circulating through her body taking hold of cancer cells and eliminating them, and added this valuable tool. As this medication is being used, millions of lives have been saved because scientists were able to combine the product of the yew tree with the oil of the castor bean plant and use it as a therapy for a disease that has become rampant in our world.

SPIRITUALITY MEDICALLY RECOGNIZED

The importance of spirituality to health and healing is receiving increasing acceptance in the medical community, according to a report in "Research News." Their evidence: More U.S. medical schools are offering education on spirituality - from four in 1992 to more than half the total of all such schools in the U.S. at present.

The American College of Physicians and the American Society of Internal Medicine have issued a report suggesting that physicians pay attention to "psychosocial, existential, or spiritual suffering of patients with serious medical illness."

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), who evaluates and accredits most of the U.S. health-care organizations, established "Spiritual Assessment Standards" to provide for a greater understanding of how spirituality impacts patient care and service.

BRAIN BIOFEEDBACK ALLEVIATES PAIN

If you could see your brain, could you control it better? Past research and contemporary clinical practice has made biofeedback commonplace. A recent advance in biofeedback monitoring, developed at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, has leaped over more traditional brain-wave conditioning work by giving patients an ongoing eyeful of the activity in a specific region of the brain.

Using real-time feedback from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, pain-control patients were able to view the action in that portion of the brain responsible for processing pain signals. The monitor presented the brain activity as a flame of increasing or decreasing strength.

Patients were able to learn very quickly how to control their pain by controlling the flame on the screen. Brain imagery technology may soon provide a method by which people will be able to develop direct control of very specific brain functions. A spin-off from this research may be the investigation of how brain control might be achieved by thought alone.

JUST THE THOUGHT OF MONEY HURTS RELATIONSHIPS

Having the thought of money cross one's mind has a surprising effect only moments later on how a person will respond to an interpersonal situation, tending to make a person more solitary, self-reliant, competitive, and expecting the same from others.

A series of experiments involving staged human interactions, tested whether or not a momentary exposure to the concept of money (such as a mounted poster showing a large dollar bill) would affect how people would respond to others. Unwitting subjects who were presented with challenges and given opportunities to ask for help were much less likely to ask for help if the dollar poster was on the wall in the room. Subjects working on a task were less likely to respond to a request for assistance by a person entering the room if the dollar poster was present.

SOME PEOPLE ARE MORE GRATEFUL

Research has demonstrated the health benefits of the emotion of gratitude. We now also have evidence that the attitude of gratitude is a habit shown more by some people than others.

Questionnaires provided to several hundred college students at Southern Methodist University and the University of California at Davis, and over l,000 adults via the Internet, measured several aspects of gratitude.

One analysis of the resulting data, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people differ in how readily they experience and express gratitude and that their friends notice and confirm these self-reports.

Another analysis revealed that those with a more grateful disposition experience more positive emotions generally, feel greater well-being, demonstrate more prosocial behaviours and traits, and express more religiousness and spirituality. Another analysis of the data showed that the more a person had a grateful disposition, the less envy and materialism did the person have, reinforcing the conclusion that gratitude may be associated with greater degrees of spirituality.

DREAM OF THE FUTURE

Here is an interesting letter to the editor of a magazine called "Venture Inward" Virginia Beach, Va. The letter is from a reader in North Carolina who had this dream in July of 2008: "I enjoyed the January/February Editors Journal entitled "The Manifestation of Hopes and Dreams."

"I saw Obama standing in a large crowd. He had a brilliant silver band that goes around the waist that sort of resembles a cumberbund - but larger than a cumberbund, more like an armor that covered his chest as well. He was speaking to the crowd, which was very close to him. Then I heard: 'If this man is spared, the whole nation will be spared. If this man is not spared, the whole nation will not be spared.' I woke up crying. From that point forth, many of us started praying for the protection of Obama and his family."

WRITTEN LANUAGE WRITTEN IN A DREAM

It is rare to see writing in a dream, but once an entire written language appeared in a dream. In the book "The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving - and How You Can, Too (Crown/Random House, 2001), Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tells the story of how the alphabet of Vai, an African written language that first appeared in a dream in the mid-l800s, spread throughout Liberia's capital city of Monrovia, so that almost everyone could read it. In fact, in the surrounding rural areas, the written language boosted literacy to a rate much higher than that of Europe at that time. Dr. Barrett writes that even today people can read the language even though the Liberian government insists that only English be taught in the schools.