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Japanese Textile Designs 132
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Great Laurel-Coloring Page
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One of the newest employees is a golden retriever
One of the newest employees at Huntsville Hospital for Women & Children has four legs. While her training is highly skilled – she was specially chosen to work in a hospital setting because of her demeanor – her job description is pretty simple: to love and be loved. And in her first few weeks on the job, she’s already made a tremendous difference for her patients, both children and adults, and for the hospital staff who have overwhelmingly embraced her.
Aster is in demand throughout the hospital on a consult basis. “The hard part is when we’re walking down the hall and someone says, ‘Oh, can you come say hi?’” says Stefani, who loves watching faces light up when they see Aster.
She regularly visits children in the emergency department, radiation/imaging, pediatric intensive care, general pediatric unit and neonatal intensive care, where she doesn’t visit with premature babies but does provide family and sibling support. She also visits adult patients in the intensive care and antepartum units.
On an average day, the hospital has 200 pediatric patients, so “we’re filtering through a lot of requests,” says Elizabeth.
The hospital still has its volunteer-driven pet therapy program, in which trained dogs make short visits with patients. “They see way more patients than Aster and I can see,” says Stefani. “Aster and I have medically based goals: reducing pain, helping patients ambulate after surgery, being present in bereavement and trauma. We’re both employees here, which opens the door for us to provide treatment-based services.”
Asteroid, a young golden retriever, is one of the most popular employees at the hospital. (Photo courtesy of Huntsville Hospital for Women and Children)
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RSA ANIMATE: How To Help Every Child Fulfil Their Potential
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Meditation helps students
A study of students in California universities showed that those who practiced a bit of meditation in their personal lives performed better on tests. This applied to students who practice the art of Zen, as well as those who simply meditate for a few minutes before class.
The research, published in the journal Mindfulness, showed that meditation worked best for first year students, which led researchers to speculate that younger students tend to struggle with concentration more.
Professor Robert Youmans, of George Mason University in Virginia, co-lead the study with University of Illinois doctoral student Jared Ramsburg. According to Professor Youmans:
“One difficulty for researchers who study meditation is that the supposed benefits of meditation do not always replicate across different studies or populations, and so we have been trying to figure out why. This data from this study suggest that meditation may help students who might have trouble paying attention or focusing. Sadly, freshmen classes probably contain more of these types of students than senior courses because student populations who have difficulty self-regulating are also more likely to leave the university.”
The researchers said that coaching students on proper meditation could improve academic results. Ramsburg’s own personal experiences inspired him to undertake the study (he is a Buddhist).
“I think that if mindfulness can improve mental clarity, focus and self-discipline, then it might be useful in a variety of settings and for a variety of goals.”
For anyone uncomfortable with meditation (even though it is not necessarily a religious practice), Ramsburg says that taking long walks in the morning before you start your day could inspire the same outcome.
“Basically, becoming just a little bit more mindful about yourself and your place in the world might have a very important, practical benefit – in this case, doing better in college.”
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Study cools idea behind hot yoga
A small study sponsored by the American Council on Exercise is one of the first to look at whether hot yoga offers any more bang for your buck than traditional yoga. The study recruited 20 healthy men and women between 19 and 44, each of whom took a 60-minute yoga class in both a room heated to 21 C and one heated to 31 C. The classes were taken 24 hours apart and were led by the same instructor and featured the same poses.
Each subject wore a heart-rate monitor and swallowed an ingestible core body temperature sensor before taking part in the class. Core body temperature was recorded five minutes before the class, every five minutes during the class and five minutes after the class.
Heart rate was recorded every minute, with subjects also ranking their perceived rate of exertion on a scale from 6 to 20.
In the end, the researchers, who hailed from the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, noted very little difference in the core temperature and heart rate of the participants despite the difference in temperature between the two classes. Core temperature for the hot yoga participants was 37.6 C versus 37.4 C for the cooler studio.
As for the intensity of the workouts, both yoga practices would be classified as “light exercise,” with heart rate averaging about 56 per cent of maximum during the regular yoga class as compared to 57 per cent of maximum heart rate during the hot yoga class.
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Oil production curb
A deal among oil-producing countries to curb production and balance an oversupplied market will achieve its objective in the first quarter of next year, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said, after prices tumbled on news of a build-up in U.S. inventories.
His Saudi counterpart, Khalid Al-Falih, said at a joint news briefing in Astana, Kazakhstan, that inventories were declining worldwide and reductions would accelerate in the next three to four months. Inventories will settle to their five-year historical average — OPEC’s target — before the end of the year, though Saudi Arabia, the group’s biggest producer, may modify its policy if output cuts don’t have the desired effect, he said. June 11, 2017 Read More HERE
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Addiction Recovery in the 21st Century
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Me peino Miguel – Tu dolor / El pescador
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Seguy Art Deco Designs 120
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