LA TIMES– For more than a decade, Cheryl Clark has lived with the chronic pain that accompanies fibromyalgia. After years of suffering with severe flu-like aches and pains, she finally found some relief — but it didn’t come from a pill or a shot. It came from exercise.

Several times a week, Clark heads to the warm-water pool and the gym at Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation in Pomona. Her pain, she says, has gone from a six or seven on a 10-point scale scale down to a one or two.

“It would kill me to walk from the car to the doctor’s office. I was using a cane. I didn’t have the mind-set that moving is the key … I really got my life back.”

Movement-based therapies such as yoga, tai chi, qigong and more mainstream forms of exercise are gaining acceptance in the world of chronic pain management. Many pain clinics and integrative medicine centers now offer movement-based therapy for pain caused by cancer and cancer treatments, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases and conditions. And Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles offers a three-year yoga therapy course as part of the school’s yoga studies program.

Several small studies in peer-reviewed journals attest to the effectiveness of these therapies.

Continue reading about Movement Therapies May Reduce Chronic Pain. 

© LA Times, 2010

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CBS– After weathering the fear of federal prosecution and competition from drug cartels, California’s medical marijuana growers see a new threat to their tenuous existence: the “Wal-Marting” of weed.

The Oakland City Council on Tuesday will look at licensing four production plants where pot would be grown, packaged and processed into items ranging from baked goods to body oil. Winning applicants would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

The move, and fledgling efforts in other California cities to sanction cannabis cultivation for the first time, has some marijuana advocates worried that regulations intended to bring order to the outlaw industry and new revenues to cash-strapped local governments could drive small “mom and pop” growers out of business. They complain that industrial-scale gardens would harm the environment, reduce quality and leave consumers with fewer strains from which to choose.

“Nobody wants to see the McDonald’s-ization of cannabis,” Dan Scully, one of the 400 “patient-growers” who supply Oakland’s largest retail medical marijuana dispensary, Harborside Health Center, grumbled after a City Council committee gave the blueprint preliminary approval last week. “I would compare it to how a small business feels about shutting down its business and going to work at Wal-Mart. Who would be attracted to that?”

The proposal’s supporters, including entrepreneurs more disposed to neckties than tie-dye, counter that unregulated growers working in covert warehouses or houses are tax scofflaws more likely to wreak environmental havoc, be motivated purely by profit and produce inferior products.

“The large-scale grow facilities that are being proposed with this ordinance will create hundreds of jobs for the city,” said Ryan Indigo Warman, who teaches pot-growing techniques at iGrow, a hydroponics store whose owners plan to apply for one of the four permits. “The ordinance is good for Oakland, and anyone who says otherwise is only protecting their own interests.”

Study: Marijuana Prices to Crater If Legalized.

Read full article about the Wal-Martization of Marijuana.

© COPYRIGHT CBS NEWS, 2010

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ALTERNET– The days of quietly retiring with a nest egg built up from years of savings from a long career on the verge of disappearing. For tens of millions of Americans, facing rising costs, shrinking incomes and growing debts they already have disappeared.

“One out of three working Americans does not have retirement savings beyond Social Security, and about 35% of those over 65 rely almost totally on Social Security alone,” Dallas Salisbury, president of the Alliance for Investor Education and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), explained to AlterNet.

“Of the remaining two-thirds of working Americans that have some retirement savings,  27 percent report less than $1,000, 16 percent between $1,000 and $9,999, 11 percent between $10,000 and $24,999, 12 percent between $25,000-$49,999, and 36 percent $50,000 or more.” Perhaps the most shocking number is that half of Americans have $2,000 or less saved for retirement. 

Crunch the numbers and you end up with a retirement myth, rather than a money-maker.  We face a colder economic reality: Not only are there no astronomical retirement returns coming down the financial pike, but what nuts and nest-eggs families have set aside for their futures have been mostly sucked dry. 

“Individuals need to follow the advice of the ages,” said Salisbury. “Spend less than you earn by 25 percent, and save for your future. This keeps your lifestyle from getting ahead of your income.”

While saving 1/4 of our shrinking incomes sounds nigh on impossible in this economic climate, many are watching their savings getting squandered by bad fund managers. One retirement Ponzi scheme starting to worry the Senate Special Committee on Aging, according to an aide who asked not to be named, are target-date funds, a financial instrument . They’re basically mutual funds that try to play equities and stocks in their early years before settling into more conservative investments like cash and fixed-income before maturing, so as not to give their investors heart attacks on the date of their retirement.

Read full article about Americans Having Nothing to Bank on for Retirement.

© COPYRIGHT ALTERNET, 2010

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