Aerial Pesticide spraying this Summer in Bay Area

If any of you live in the San Francisco Bay Area - you might want to check out these news stories concerning the Light Brown Apple Moth Pesticide spraying that will occur in the Bay Area this summer. Somehow it has gone unnoticed by the community until recently and it is causing an uproar by local residents concerned for their health. This includes a group of mothers who are lobbying to change the spraying, but it might be impossible to do at this late notice.

If you click on the binder link below - it has the latest articles, and websites that can help you find out more information on what to protect yourself if you are stuck in the area during the aerial spraying. Everything is organized by tabs and sub-tabs just click on them to view the websites.

Moth spraying in Bay Area

Don’t Scratch that Itch - Posion Oak

It was a beautiful evening picnic in the hills overlooking the bay and city of San Francisco. Good friends, good wine and, little did I know, poison oak. Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I had a mosquito bite. But I when I turned the lights on and looked at my leg my heart sunk. I clearly didn’t catch it early, so I was going to be in for some painful itching.

I’ve had poison oak so many times that I keep a bottle of Technu soap in my shower (a true live-saver). But I was amazed at what I didn’t know about this nasty plant and its insidious urushiol oil. I had always thought that scratching spread the stuff. I also thought that the oil “got in your system” and popped out in other spots. None of this is true! Click on the binder below to get the real story about poison oak from sources such as the FDA and the American Academy of Dermatology.

Poison Oak

Surprising events in the news

There are days when you can’t believe what goes on in the world. Some events remind you of the ancient past and you think we haven’t come very far as a species. Other events make you wonder what the future is going to look like.

 

Click on the link or icon below to view a few article I found pretty hard to believe.

 

Surprising news 1

Marketing Genius

I have worked with many marketers from the pharmaceutical industry and I have to admit that they really are some of the best and the brightest. The pharmaceutical industry, as a whole, works really hard on tracking metrics and they have a detailed understanding how each commercial and each sales initiative impacts their bottom line. The more I learn about the industry the more I am in awe of their marketing power.

But what happens when you harness that marketing genius and add to it the pressure of running a public company - where quarter-to-quarter profit growth is the only judge of a company’s performance? What happens to ethics when you will lose your job if your don’t show quarter-over-quarter growth? It is clear that this is where regulation needs to come in to play. But just how do you regulate companies that can spend more on lobbyists than any other industry? Do you know that the United States and New Zealand are the only countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise?

Click on the binder below for some interesting videos on the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry. Some of videos are funny and others are more deeply disturbing, but they are all very insightful.

Just take a pill

Help for new soccer coaches and team parents

It’s soccer season again and many of you might be first time coaches, assistant coaches or team parents.  Welcome to the club! I’ve included in this blog a couple of binders that you might find very helpful.  The first is a binder on coaching tips - including useful flash and youtube videos to have the kids review on soccer skills.The other is a binder that belongs to one of the soccer teams and you might find it useful as a template for creating your own team binder.   To view the binders just click on the link below - works with latest IE, Firefox and Safari.   

Soccer Coach Binder

 

 

Olympic Marseille girls soccer team

Pain in the Neck!

I try to set up my computer ergonomically. But sometimes, when I’m working intently on a project, I forget to get up and take a break and move around. The result is a spasm in my neck that generally happens overnight - after a good night’s sleep. My head ends up in a locked position and attempting to move it sends stabbing pains down my shoulder and arm. I’m just lucky that I found Bowen Therapy. This non-invasive therapy works every time! It usually works instantly, but sometimes the first session just helps dramatically and the second session is required to completely eliminate the stiffness.

I put together this binder of great links on Bowen Therapy for my neighbor who suffers from chronic back pain. These websites explain the treatment far better than I ever could. Click on the binder below for a great overview of this amazing treatment, personal success stories (including my own), and listings of practitioners.

Bowen Therapy

Severe Joint Pain

My husband was only in his mid-thirties when he started suffering from debilitating joint pain - primarily in his knees and ankles. He would wake up in the morning almost unable to walk. He started taking aspirin, but soon that wasn’t enough.

I had read a little about the dangers of aspartame (NutraSweet) and asked him to try giving up his beloved diet cokes for a couple of days. He said that he probably couldn’t live without them, but he would try. After only a couple of days without the diet cokes he was pain free. But he thought that meant he could start drinking diet cokes again. It only took one diet coke before he was in agony again.

It turns out that it wasn’t easy to give up the diet cokes. It also is almost impossible to avoid aspartame. The other night he ordered a margarita and there must have been aspartame in the margarita mix because he could hardly walk the next day.

On days that he can avoid aspartame though, he is pain free. I’m so glad that we made this discovery before starting down a long path of pain killers and arthritis medication!

The binder below contains some of the resources that I found on aspartame, though I’m sure there are more. This digital binder has some interesting links with scientific data, write-ups from doctors, personal stories, and even one horrifying ‘home experiment’ with aspartame.

Stick to Sugar

Training for a Triathlon

If you live in the East Bay and are training for a triathlon, it would be useful to know where there are places you can swim, courses you can bike and trails you can run. One of our users put together this very nice binder. click on the link below to see if it can make your training life easier.

Triathlon

We’re green…

that is to say we’re naive about this whole environmental awareness, save the world, go ‘green’ thing. My daughter’s 4th grade class has been spending the last month becoming aware of the global effects of pollution on the environment as they get ready for ‘Focus the Nation’ day - today. Our family has been in the process of changing the way we get to school, how we pack lunches and what we set the table with.Of course we’ve used the web as a resource to find out things - lots of things that we didn’t know about. For example, the students have been told to replace plastic snack bags by using plastic containers - but that sure makes for a very large lunch box. We thought about wax paper bags - except we didn’t know if they were biodegradable and neither did the teachers.That is how our research began. We then looked into replacing plastic water bottles with those colorful water bottles that you can re-use. From what we could find out, they could be potentially toxic, too. Looks like we might have to go back to those old thermos bottles we used to use - the ones with the glass inside that always shattered and made funny noises in your lunch- remember those?Its pretty interesting stuff wondering what is better for the environment and balancing that with what is healthy or convenient for you. You can’t just assume that the popular method is the way to go.If you’d like to find out if wax paper bags are an alternative or what types of plastic are safe for your kids - click on the livebinder below:

Green efforts