When I was about four years old I had a play date at Meryl Streep’s house. It was just an informal kind of a thing where my dad, who built sculptures designed by Streep’s husband, Don Gummer, dumped me off at the front door and picked me up a few hours later. I remember very little: getting lost in a maze of hallways, losing my velcro-fastened shoes and hanging out with the Gummer girls in a large bathroom, where they seemed to do a lot of their hanging out.
Posts Tagged: Wellness
Amino Acids May Restore Balance
These days, doctors aren’t just writing more prescriptions, they’re piling them on. In a 2010 study by Dr. Ramin Mojitabai, doctors were found to prescribe two or more medicines during a single office visit 60 percent of the time—a 20 percent increase since 2000.
Happy Hour for Vitamin B12 Shots
Several weeks ago, an adventurous friend of mine told me about a local medical center’s “B12 Happy Hour” shots. No, not the kind thrown down the gullet and finished with lime, she clarified, the kind that is injected: 1,500 water-soluble migrograms of the coveted B vitamin delivered directly to the tender tissue of the rump—$17 between 3 and 6 in the afternoon every Wednesday.
Santa Cruz Author Goes Zen in The Yard
For landscape designer and writer Zachiah Murray, walking into a garden is like walking into a meditation hall. She becomes grounded. Like the conscious energy that lingers even after the practitioners have gone, the plants call her to the present.
Advice from Santa Cruz Running Coaches
Jamey Harris, 41, and Rod Heskett, 44, are the heart and soul of Santa Cruz Running, a six-year-old organization that brings runners together every Wednesday evening in Capitola and every Sunday morning in Nisene Marks, all levels welcome.
The ABCs of Multivitamins
The last Wellness column, which was about anemia, ended with the advice to “try a multivitamin and eat more kale.” A week spent wandering the aisles of the local health stores and a phone interview with Jerry Garcia’s former physician convinced me that this easily-dispensed advice is more crucial than ever—but useless if not followed with care.
Kale, Supplements Provide Solutions to Iron Deficiency
As a child, I went through an anemic phase, a very tired time punctuated by my mother chasing me around the house with a dropper of metallic drops to squirt on my tongue. I was 4. Chomping copious amounts of iron-rich beets and kale, per my mother’s orders, I began to feel a bit more energetic.
Melatonin Shows Encouraging Medical Signs
Imagine an organ that regulates everything from sleep and mood to sex and food—an organ that Renee Descartes referred to as “the seat of the soul.” It’s called the pineal gland, and current research indicates that the possibilities for this hormone are endless.
Advocates for the Mentally Ill Struggle to Change System
Descending on Thimann Lecture Hall at 8am on a Thursday morning is like joining a flock of zombies: coffee cups and notebooks loosely clutched, we shuffle through the remnants of last night’s dreams towards habitual seats in the 300-seat hall. By 8:12am, though, it’s apparent that this isn’t just another morning in the risers of PSYC170, Professor David A. Hoffman’s abnormal psychology class at UC–Santa Cruz.
Drawn to Santa Cruz, A Cancer Patient Rethinks Life
Less than three years ago, Jennifer Heskett Yamaguchi laid on an examination table in Tucson and watched the monitor as a urologist sent a camera into her bladder. What she saw turned her world upside down: more than 20 cancerous tumors—too many to even count—taking over the right side of her bladder.
