Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
by Maggie Marx on Apr 23rd, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
Die geneigdheid om die boodskapper aan te val, is seker een van die mees primitiewe verdedigingsmeganismes wat mense gebruik wanneer hul opvattings gekritiseer word.
Dit was onlangs die geval toe die bekende sportwetenskaplike Tim Noakes omstrede uitlatings gemaak het oor die meriete van ’n hoëproteïen-dieet.
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by Maggie Marx on Apr 8th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
Met die verskyning van Melanie Grobler se debuutbundel: Tye en swye in die lewe van Hester H het die indertydse boekredakteur Elfra Erasmus die volgende te sê gehad: “Dis moeilik om Melanie Grobler te peil. Nie oor sy vóórgee om akademies goed onderlê of ’n ingewikkelde mens te wees nie, maar omdat sy in haar eie wêreld leef, ’n wêreld afgesonder van mense … ’n Mens sukkel om die meeste dinge wat sy sê aan die werklikheid van die alledaagse bestaan te knoop. Dit sweef rond op vlakke waar die deursnee mens net soms ’n draai maak.”
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by Maggie Marx on Apr 4th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
Die titel sal mense dalk afskrik om dié boekie – in ’n nuttige sakgids-formaat – te lees, maar moenie ’n fout maak nie: Van die eerste bladsy af trek die skrywer, ’n professor in geskiedenis, jou in.
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by Maggie Marx on Feb 20th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
In 1996 is Eve Ensor se Vagina Monologues vir die eerste keer opgevoer en van hierdie obskure begin het dit gegroei tot ’n internasionale produksie. Ensor se projek was gebaseer op sowat 200 onderhoude wat sy met vroue gevoer het oor onder meer hulle sienings van seks en hulle belewenis van menstruasie, geweld en verkragting.
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by Maggie Marx on Dec 6th, 2012
Martin and Marion Shirran bring you Pause Button Therapy:
Press release:
One of the commonest challenges for schools is supporting children and young people to manage their behaviour.
How helpful would it be if they could occasionally just pause – freeze time like they do in the movies for a few moments – and consider the consequences of the actions they’re about to take?
Trials of just such a technique, undertaken at a number of Midlands schools, resulted in reports of considerable financial savings as a result of the reduction in staff hours required to deal with challenging children.
The new book Pause Button Therapy, already praised by leading cognitive behaviour therapy expert Prof Windy Dryden, explains and demonstrates this innovative and interactive new method. It is based on the simple idea of using the Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward and Play buttons on a remote control device to provide additional thinking time.
Training in pause button therapy (PBT) has already taken place in education settings. Participants include school leaders, teachers, pastoral care professionals, support staff, mentors, educational psychologists and behaviour specialists.
Deputy head at one school, John Taylor, said “The changes in behaviour are remarkable. They’ve happened very quickly and are also being sustained. This has resulted in us saving significant amounts of staff time on dealing with challenging behaviour with all of the children using PBT.”
Pastoral manager at the school, Nathan Ross, says “We targeted the trial of PBT at a group of pupils who continually demonstrated a negative attitude in school and had failed to respond to other approaches. The children’s parents were involved in the trials and also reported an improved relationship at home.”
About the authors
Martin and Marion Shirran are both trained hypnotherapists and own and run the Elite Clinics in Spain, where they use a combination of therapies to successfully treat a wide range of problems.
Fiona Graham, formerly a journalist in the UK, has worked on the Shirrans’ books for a number of years.
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by Maggie Marx on Nov 15th, 2012
Uitspraak: wortel
In hierdie baie waardevolle boek deel Nicki Spies haar jare lange nadenke oor seksualiteit met die leser. Sy is ’n ervare narratiewe terapeut en genderspesialis wat glo mense verstaan hul lewe en maak sin van hul ervarings deur hul verskillende stories.
Al is die boek gegrond op navorsing wat sy tydens haar meesters- en doktorale studie aan Unisa gedoen het, is dit baie toeganklik en informeel geskryf.
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by Luso on Nov 11th, 2012
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who has kept the world’s eye on the pulse, heart and soul of neuroscience for decades, has been profiled in an article in New York Magazine by David Wallace-Wells. The profile is dedicated to Sacks’ intrinsic qualities – intelligence, curiosity, compassion and an over-arching humanity. He has written about his own life and the experiences of patients, these thereafter becoming the bestselling books on neurology. In his latest book, Hallucinations, Sacks offers an explanation for why some people have hallucinations, and talks about his own drug-induced hallucinations when he was in his thirties.
The New York Magazine article also looks at the curious case of a new kind of writing, the “neuronovel”, which includes books by authors such as Ian McEwan and Rivka Galchen. A number of books by Oliver Sacks have also been adapted into films, including Awakenings with Robin Williams in the role of a fictionalized version of Sacks. Williams and Sacks are now friends.
Sacks is probably the most famous brain doctor alive, and his background reveals something of why this is. He recalls a part of his youth, where his mother led him to autopsy the body of a girl the same age as he was, at fourteen.
“To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment,” ran the epigraph to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks’s fourth book and his first best seller—the one that made him famous, in 1985, as a Scheherazade of brain disorder. A sensitive bedside-manner neurologist, he had previously written three books, none of which had attracted much notice at all. The Man Who Mistook would mark the beginning of another career, and a much more public one, as perhaps the unlikeliest ambassador for brain science—a melancholic, savantlike physician disinterested in grand theories and transfixed by those neurological curiosities they failed to explain. Sacks was 52 years old and cripplingly withdrawn, a British alien living a lonely aquatic life on City Island, and for about ten years had been dealing with something like what he’d later call “the Lewis Thomas crisis,” after the physician and biologist who decided, in his fifties, to devote himself to writing essays and poetry.
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by Maggie Marx on Nov 5th, 2012
Maritza Breitenbach has released a new edition of her book The Cookie Book: Unveiling the Women’s Secret, under a new title, The Cookie Book: Celebrating the Art, Power and Mystery of Women’s Sweetest Spot.
The book, for which she won a 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award in the category “Women’s Issues”, is now also available in Afrikaans as Die koekieboek.
Press Release:
The Cookie Book: The art, power and mystery of womens’ sweetest spot is not, as one might first assume, a cookery book but, much like any good culinary manual, it provides instruction, advice, inspiration and entertainment. Women of all ages, colour or creed, are invited to journey into the heart of society’s most sacred and taboo topics to discover the wondrous secrets of their most intimate treasure.
This, first of its kind, educational book provides an intimate guide throughout life – from infancy to adolescence, from being a lover and a mother, to menopause and beyond. The book gently weaves its way through a number of areas such as hygiene, puberty, virginity, the G-spot, masturbation, pregnancy, childbirth and the menopause, while offering amusing snippets from ancient times.
About the author
Maritza Breitenbach is the mother of three children and has been the rightful owner of her own private Eden for more than 45 years. After completing a Master of Philosopy degree in Biomedical Ethics, she was inspired to write this book by her love of research and a long-held desire to dispel misconceptions that hamper personal growth and happiness. Breitenbach is a sought-after public speaker and runs popular workshops inspiring women to enjoy and celebrate the most intimate part of their being.
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by Luso on Oct 16th, 2012
By Aubrey Paton for The Times
Energy – what’s that? I can’t even remember the last time I felt anything like energetic. Most of us are chronically tired and stressed as we battle our way through the day, combining – for many – a full-time job with the duties of a cook, cleaner, child minder, gardener and family therapist.
The modern lifestyle requires more energy than our bodies are designed to produce: physically we are stuck in the Dark Ages. Exhaustion rules supreme.
Which is why Julie Maree Wood’s 4 Week Energy Diet: From Exhausted to Energized the Natural Way will probably fly off the shelves as drained consumers search for the promised Holy Grail of renewed vitality amidst meal plans, menus and recipes.
But alas, there is no magic formula and some of the foods suggested in this book are beyond the reach of most South Africans in terms of cost and availability, not to mention preparation time. There is a need for a guide to optional nutrition for people who are on a low or no income, but this is not it.
In addition to containing pricey and obscure ingredients, many of the dishes simply take too long to prepare.
Woods does give common-sense tips: eat less meat; avoid processed food; cut out fats and sugars; have a variety of fresh fruit and veg and, of course, drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Shun booze and coffee: as for cigarettes, well – you’re joking, right?
But you know all this: there is no quick fix to our flagging energy levels. This book is a good investment – if you belong to the select group of ladies who lunch on adzuki bean and vegetable miso stew.
- 4 Week Energy Diet is published by Struik Lifestyle
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by Lindsay on Sep 19th, 2012
Six doctors and academics, including Patrick Commerford who is a professor of cardiology and Head of the Cardiac Clinic at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, have collaborated on a letter to the Cape Times calling into question claims made by Tim Noakes in his book, Challenging Beliefs.
The letter states that they believe Noakes has gone too far in saying that everyone could benefit from switching to a high-fat and high-protein diet and they compare his views to Aids denialism, saying that we don’t need “cholesterol denialism”. They also question his methods, saying that it would have been better for him to debate his ideas in the academic sphere or within medical literature before publishing them.
Noakes responded to these points in a letter to the Cape Times and presented his findings on what causes heart disease. Noakes also said that the theory that blood cholesterol and a high-fat diet are the sole causes of heart disease will be “one of the greatest errors in the history of medicine.”
Sports scientist Tim Noakes goes too far in suggesting that a switch to a high-fat, high-protein diet is advisable for everyone, say six top doctors and academics.
It may, in fact, be dangerous for anyone with or at risk of heart problems, they say, adding in a letter to the Cape Times (full text below): “Having survived ‘Aids denialism’ we do not need to be exposed to ‘cholesterol denialism’.”
Tim Noakes has hit back at critics of his new diet, saying the theory that blood cholesterol and a high fat diet are the causes of heart disease will be one of the greatest errors in the history of medicine.
“It is time to admit that the theory has failed. We need to adopt an open mind if we are ever to discover the real cause [or causes] of the current global epidemic of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease, all of which are likely caused by the same factors.”
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