I see a lot of well-meaning people saying "Health care is a right!!" as their rallying cry. Yet, I don't think they've stopped to really think about what they are saying. Health care can't actually be a right, because forcing someone else to give you a service against their will is called slavery, and you'd be taking someone else's rights away in the process.

Consider. I know how to do Reiki healing. It can help a lot of people. You could say "Reiki healing is a right!" and then try to force me to Reiki everyone I possibly could, non-stop, 24-hours per day. Perhaps I do help people in that fashion...but is that right, to lock up Reiki healers in a room and force them to heal until they are exhausted?

I hope Andy Swan doesn't mind that I am copying his entire blog post on the subject verbatim, because he explains it very logically:

Mike Adams over at Natural News just published an article claiming that swine flu (H1N1) was a hoax. He writes:

The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.

You can read the rest of Mike's rant over at Natural News.

Now...I like Mike Adams and love his site (I even contribute to it occasionally). But sometimes Mike gets caught up in either/or thinking. In this case, it's either that swine flu is a real threat, or it must be a hyped, made-up threat to profit Big Pharma.

The United States Senate just pushed through a vote on the health care bill. I am frankly quite upset about it. I simply do not want to be forced to buy conventional medical insurance when a) I honestly can't afford it right now b) what disposable income I do spend on health care, I prefer to spend on alternative health care.

I am one of those people constantly mentioned in the health care debate - one of the uninsured. I did apply for coverage some years ago but was denied due to my pre-existing condition, chronic fatigue syndrome. However, I have come to prefer paying out of pocket for my health care. And most of my health care is alternative in nature.

When I first had chronic fatigue syndrome, I went from doctor to doctor. None could help me, and some doubted whether I was really sick because the illness wasn't very well-known at the time. (I got it over 20 years ago!)

If there's one takeaway I got from watching the Biggest Loser finale last night, it's that being the right weight makes you better looking.

Note that I wrote being the right weight. Not being thin per se.

One thing that happens sometimes on the Biggest Loser is that contestants go way overboard sometimes in an effort to win the big prize. Contestants may dehydrate or starve themselves to the point of looking emaciated, not healthy. We saw a little bit of this last year when Helen won, looking more scarecrow-like than healthy.

This latest season fortunately did not reward someone who looked skeletal - Danny, the winner, looked like the right weight for his height. And he looked fabulous! His face had changed so much he said people didn't recognize him. He looked 10-20 years younger.

I rarely buy ice cream, but I do buy pie on occasion, and when Albertson's offered me a free box of Breyer's ice cream with a purchase of a pie, I could not refuse.

So I bought Breyer's vanilla ice cream - you know, the one with the vanilla beans. Only, when I opened up the ice cream, the beans seemed a lot smaller than I remembered them. I did a quick Google search and it turns out there's more than just smaller vanilla beans (or bean flecks) - Breyer's "all natural" ice cream also has an ingredient that it did not have before: tara gum.

Tara gum is apparently some sort of stabilizer that is made by grinding the endosperm (?) of tara tree seeds. It was added to Breyer's ice cream to make the product more consistent despite the temperature differentials that happen during transport. (Apparently, some customers were complaining of ice in their ice cream!)

I did not watch Obama's health care speech in part because I did not expect him to say anything truly revolutionary on the subject of health care. Our current health care debate in America is an emotional one, but I feel our approach is all wrong. Trying to funnel more people into a broken health insurance system is not the way to go. Even adding a public option will still maintain the status quo of people buying "insurance" just to get their basic health needs taken care of.

Health insurance, in my mind, should never be about health maintenance. It should only be applied to those catastrophic events that we would otherwise not be able to pay for: a broken leg, a serious disease.

Given a choice, would you rather be beautiful but brain-damaged, or average-looking but living with full mental capacity? Not surprising, scientists are finding out that Botox, that oh-too-popular wrinkle treatment, can potentially travel into the brain, at least in lab animals:

One of the deadliest poisons in nature and a possible bioterrorism agent, this neurotoxin reached the market, in very dilute doses, starting in 1989 as Botox. A big reason Botox and its cousins, such as Myobloc, were OK'd was that preclinical testing showed that after being injected, they did not travel along the body's highways—nerve cells—to the brain and spinal cord. Yes, there was some evidence the toxin slipped into the bloodstream or the lymph system, but Botox in the bloodstream cannot enter the brain, says its manufacturer.

Are we living in a medical police state? Since when is it a good use of police time and resources to go after a mom who wants to treat her son's cancer with natural remedies? Don't they have better things to do? It's not like chemotherapy actually guarantees a cure, and it can be extremely detrimental to quality of life.

Here's the story from the Associated Press:

Authorities nationwide were on the lookout Wednesday for a mother and her 13-year-old cancer-stricken son who fled after refusing the chemotherapy that doctors say could save the boy's life.

Colleen Hauser and her son, Daniel, who has Hodgkin's lymphoma, apparently left their southern Minnesota home sometime after a doctor's appointment and court-ordered X-ray on Monday showed his tumor had grown.

I watched the Biggest Loser finale last night and was disappointed that my favorite, the cutie Mike Morelli, lost to the less wholesome Helen Phillips by a mere 5 pounds. Mike, who lost more than he weighs now, has hit a healthy weight of approximately 180 pounds, whereas Helen slimmed herself down to a scary 117.

While both Mike and Tara looked fabulous, Helen did not look healthy with her scrawny arms and emaciated look. She did not seem to have built up much in the way of lean muscle (judging from the shape of her arms, which were way too noticeable with their loose skin in her sleeveless dress).

Now people all over the Internet are speculating about Helen's health and methods for achieving this weight loss, and anorexia is the word being bantered about.

I can't tell you how many times I speak to a client on the phone about their stress, only to find out they are not exercising at all.

Exercise is probably the number one thing you can do for your well-being. Even if you can't do strenuous exercise, try doing mild exercise that works with your fitness level.

Not all exercise is equal.

I was in a yoga class with Guru Singh once, and he explained that any exercise that combines movement with the breath is exercise that is healing.

He gave as examples yoga, swimming, and bicycling. (All things I love to do!)

Qigong or tai chi are also excellent exercises that combine breath with movement.

The breath oxygenates the body and the movement improves muscle tone and cleans out physical toxins. Mindful breathing also helps reduce stress and anxiety.