You can choose to take your child to a homeopath, chiropractor or doctor of Chinese Medicine without a referral from a doctor, but you need a referral from a veterinarian to make the same choice for your pets. And many veterinarians will not refer pets to alternative health care practitioners, effectively limiting your access to these important...
No safe levels of radiation
In a recent press release, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission claims to be expert on the subject of “junk science.” I believe it. How else could the CNSC claim there is “no risk” to health from elevated levels of radioactive materials in the environment when so many major scientific bodies say the opposite? The US National...
Privatizing compassion – Squeezing a profit from HandyDART
Dec 17, 2009
by Dean Brown A chilling rain falls in the Vancouver night. I sit in a bus outside St. Paul’s Hospital preparing to board a group of kidney dialysis patients and take them home. Exhausted by their ordeal of being hooked up to a machine for four hours, some of them shuffle forward on their own steam, determined and steady in their step, not too advanced in...
David Suzuki earns Right Livelihood Honorary Award
Dec 17, 2009
The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 to honour and support those “offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today.” It has become widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize.’ The 2009 Right Livelihood Award goes to four recipients, including David Suzuki, who receives the Honorary...
Shaping the body – The crisis in our closest relationship
Dec 17, 2009
by Susie Orbac Every day, my inbox, like most people’s, fills with invitations to enlarge the size of my penis or my breasts, to purchase the pleasure and potency booster Viagra and to try the latest herbal or pharmaceutical preparation to lose weight. The exhortations have fooled the spam filter and the popular science pages, which too sing of implants...
IT vs TLC – Electronic medical records? Try listening first
Dec 17, 2009
by Marc Ringel, MD illustration by Steve Sedam As far back as you look, the history of science is rife with puzzlement over the relationship between mind, spirit, consciousness, and experience on one side, and body on the other. How to reconcile the subjectivity of human life with the objectivity of science continues to be a central issue of post-modern life,...
Pet connections
Dec 17, 2009
Finding the balance between compassion and consumption, pets and plate. by Geoff Olson The late American writer Kurt Vonnegut once said his greatest joy in life was rolling around with his dog in the grass. We can only imagine what Vonnegut, who lamented his species’ ecologically suicidal behaviour, would have thought about a recent study claiming...
H1N1 pandemic or panic?
Dec 17, 2009
Dr. Tom Jefferson’s research is a powerful antidote to rampant bio-evangelism The amount of death and disease would be less if all disease were left to itself. – (1835) Dr. Jacob Bigelow, prominent US physician and botanist He should be one of the most famous people on the planet right now, lauded for his research and a consultant for the...
Dec 17, 2009
by Chris Jordan Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these...
Rebuilding media from Canwest’s ashes
Nov 19, 2009
INDEPENDENT MEDIA by Steve Anderson It was just over two years ago that, along with a network of organizations and individuals, I launched what would be the first of many public campaigns to keep Canada’s media open and democratic. The “Stop the Big Media Takeover” campaign was focused on the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications...
Compassionate Choices
Nov 19, 2009
NUTRISPEAK by Vesanto Melina If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. – Sir Paul McCartney It baffles me that so many ‘animal lovers’ can chow down on a chunk of animal flesh. People attribute human emotions to their pets and take their beloved pup, cat or bird to an animal clinic when medical care is needed and then...
Preserving your tomatoes
Nov 19, 2009
ON THE GARDEN PATH by Carolyn Herriot Warning: this article will make your mouth water. Every year, I tell myself to cut down on the number of tomato varieties I grow. I still ended up with 35 different varieties this fall and it was a bumper year. You may know I’m an avid seed saver, so I’ve been busy saving the seeds from multitudes of ripe...
Moving on
Nov 19, 2009
UNIVERSE WITHIN by Gwen Randall-Young Sometimes, there are people in our lives with whom we have painful connections. It might be a parent, whom we hold responsible for a difficult childhood, a friend who has betrayed us, an ex-partner or a supervisor or colleague in the workplace. These relationships may remain unresolved either because raising the issues...