Category: Body+Mind+Spirit

Mind, Body, Spirit - January 2016

12/30/2015

3-D Printers Changing Lives

New 3-D printers are making prosthetic devices, making limb loss a “nuisance instead of a disability.”
- by Dr. Christina Richardson, photos courtesy of Enabling the Future.

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Leon McCarthy was born without a left hand. His father had been searching for a low-cost prosthetic solution for his son when he found an instructional video online that showed a prosthetic hand that could be printed on a 3-D printer.

The instructions came from Ivan Owen, an inventor in Washington state and his partner Richard Van As in South Africa. They created a prosthetic hand with the intention of getting it to as many people as possible.

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Jon Schull, a research scientist at Rochester Institute of Technology MAGIC Center created an online community, e-NABLE, that pairs children and adults with missing or deformed fingers, hands, or forearms with makers who produce customized 3-D-printed prostheses that can improve their lives.

Enabling The Future is an organization connecting people who are in need and the 3-D printing hobbyists who volunteer to design, print, and fit the devices. A Google+ community was created for makers to collaborate, innovate and improve the open source designs.

Just like printing a document, you press print and the 3-D printer builds the object designed on the screen by putting down tiny layers of plastic to make it. A prosthetic arm — a fancy one — costs about $40,000, too much to spend on a child who would outgrow it in a year.

One in 2,000 children are born with some kind of an arm- or hand abnormality. They can’t pick things up, write, draw, or play ball with that hand. With a 3-D printer you can make a device with $20 worth of plastic. If it breaks, is outgrown, or the technology improves, just make a new arm or finger or make it another color. The devices hold up well and help kids be just like their friends, but with a cool robo-arm they may have helped design themselves.

Jon Schull spoke to Gwen Ifill on the PBS Newshour on November 23rd.

Schull said, “You know, disability is a funny word. Disability means you can’t do something. A person has a disability if he’s in a world where he can’t do something. The technology of eyeglasses turned nearsightedness and farsightedness in to a nuisance, when it used to be a disability. New technology is going to turn things like you’re missing a hand or you can’t move your body or you have brain damage into a nuisance, rather than a disability.”

Amazing what we humans are capable of. If you have or get a 3-D printer, consider getting into the hand-making business — you will change a disability into a nuisance.

Mind, Body, Spirit - September 2015

9/1/2015

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Consumers spend over $33 billion a year on complementary and alternative medicines. What's the difference and how conventional medicine is looking at coordinating approaches for optimum health and healing
- by Christina Richardson, Ph.D.

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Do a search online for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and you will get over six million hits. There will be some valuable information on some of the pages but, oh! My! Some will just make you shake your head.

The National Institutes of Health has been doing research on (CAM) since 1999. In 2007 the National Health Interview Survey found that 38% of adults and 12% of children had used some form of CAM in the past year, at a cost of $33.9 billion out-of- pocket on CAM practices and products.

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There are two approaches to these practices:

If a non-mainstream practice is used together with conventional medicine, it is considered “complementary.”
If a non-mainstream practice in used in place of conventional medicine, it’s considered “alternative.”

Bringing conventional and complementary approaches together in a coordinated way is an integrative approach to health and wellness. For example, research is being conducted on chronic pain among active-duty military personnel and veterans to see if mindfulness meditation, self-hypnosis, or other methods are of value.

Cancer patients who are getting integrative therapies such as massage, healing touch, and yoga have less pain, anxiety and fatigue.

If you are a regular reader, you know I would not pass up the complementary medical benefits of pet therapy. In hospice and nursing home settings, stress levels are lower, depression is lessened, and mental stimulation is improved just by holding or being close to an animal.

So, listen to your doctor and if you get a go ahead, add yoga, tai-chi, massage, or some of the other complementary practices to your routine.

Download this fact sheet from the National Institutes of Health for your further consideration.

Mind, Body, Spirit - August 2015

8/1/2015

The Best Medicine

This month, a look at the very measurable health benefits obtained by indulging in one of life's sweetest pleasures - laughter!
- by Christina Richardson

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Check in with yourself. How are you feeling right this moment? Are you stressed, tired, not feeling well, have a cold, or something else that keeps you from being yourself?

Think about this for a moment or two and then watch this video.

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