Naturalpath

My first attempt at a cooking show! I like to cook and thought I would demonstrate that cooking a healthy meal can be fast, easy and economical. I have watched a lot of traditional cooking shows that demonstrate how to create tasty food, but unfortunately the fare is usually pretty unhealthy because of very high saturated fat content, sugar, etc.

Of course, home cooked meals are usually healthier than eating out, and anything made from scratch is better than processed food, so traditional cooking shows are very beneficial if they encourage people to prepare food at home in my opinion.

After my underwhelming experience with the allopathic physician and no improvement at all after the shot of cortisone, I decided to try an acupuncturist in San Francisco that I had been referred to. He was a very traditional Chinese practitioner who had been educated in China and in the US and I immediately felt that he was very competent and knowledgeable.

Since I had some trouble with my other shoulder as well, he began by giving me acupressure massage and acupuncture (with an electrical current) on each shoulder. I was very impressed by the amount of time he would spend working on the shoulders during the sessions (which lasted approximately 1 hour and fifteen minutes). He was also quite reasonably priced compared to some of my other practitioners, although my insurance does not cover acupuncture so I had to pay out of pocket.

My shoulder issues started about eight months ago when I strained my right shoulder moving some boxes. It felt kind of inflamed and sore, but as the weeks went by I became concerned since it was not healing. Finally I started going to chiropractor and applied kinesthesiologist. She tried a variety of things, including some dietary changes, but most of her treatments were centered around hooking me up to some kind of electronic machine that administered some type of shock to my shoulder. The treatment itself was kind of unpleasant since it the electric machine was painful. I saw some very modest results but, after about 6 treatments, I was not seeing results and decided to try something else.

For the last wight months I have had a problem with my shoulder - it has been sore and inflamed and I have been to a  number of types of practitioners to try to heal it.  The following is a record of my experience with different types of practitioners and how different treatments have affected my shoulder.

Although I hold an MBA and have a background in high technology, e-business and management consulting, for some years now I have felt the need to align my personal values more closely with my career, and working at Naturalpath, with its focus on environmentalism and natural health, is a perfect opportunity for me to do this.  

I have been an active participant in the green movement for many years;  I became an ardent recycler in the mid-1980s, I was a volunteer on the Alaskan oil spill in 1989, and I have organized several large musical benefits for environmental causes. Also, in recent years, I have become increasingly concerned with a wide range of issues related to diet and nutrition in America, the obesity epidemic, use of pesticides and the dysfunctional way our health care system operates.  I felt that the time had come to combine my work life with my personal passion for a greener, healthier world.

If you're worried about the quality of your tap water, bottled water is not necessarily the best solution. Here's why:

1. It's expensive: According to calculations by the Natural Resources Defense Council, bottled water can cost from 240 to up to 10,000 times more per gallon than water from the faucet.

2. It may not be  safer than tap water: Despite popular misperceptions (spawned primarily by advertising), bottled water is not regulated as strictly as tap water. In fact, unlike tap water, regulations allow bottled water to contain some contamination by E.coli or fecal coliform and don't require disinfection for Cryptosporidium or Giardia. And, as Consumer Reports tests discovered, unhealthy chemicals can migrate from plastic bottles into the water.