Category: Health & Fitness

How Are Your Fridays Going?
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How Are Your Fridays Going?

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What are you doing this Friday? I’m asking about your penance, not that it’s my business, but the business of the Church is something I care about. And it seems that Friday penances largely disappeared along with the long lines outside Brown’s Fish and Chips every Friday. That was the fish restaurant in my neighborhood […]

Essential Oils: The Good, the Bad, and the Occult
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Essential Oils: The Good, the Bad, and the Occult

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Scents are in everything from cleaners, air fresheners, cosmetics and lotions and even drawer liners. And in recent years, the big business of essential oils promises health and well-being through smells. Who doesn’t like to breathe in a good smell? Taking a deep whiff of chocolate or lavender is pleasant. But if you want to […]

How to Survive Insomnia
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How to Survive Insomnia

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I was asked the other day if I suffer from insomnia? Uh, yes. From time-to-time anyway, and it’s terrible.  I never used to have a problem sleeping. Anybody remember those college days of setting the alarm clock for 10am? And sleeping all the way through the night, until 10am? Yeah, that’s a little pathetic, but […]

What’s It All About, Alfie?
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What’s It All About, Alfie?

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For the second time within a year, England has a high-profile case of court-mandated murder of a desperately ill child. The first was Charlie Gard, and now comes Alfie Evans. Alfie missed several developmental milestones in his first seven months of life, which did not alarm physicians at the time. It’s not known precisely what […]

The Principle of Solidarity and U.S. Healthcare: A Closer Look
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The Principle of Solidarity and U.S. Healthcare: A Closer Look

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When members of Congress were debating the Affordable Care Act, many Catholics suggested that the Catholic Principle of Subsidiarity was particularly instructive in the ongoing U.S. healthcare debate.  Although mindful of the many relevant Catholic principles involved in the discussions of U.S. Healthcare (e.g., common good, separation of Church and State, life, primacy of focus […]

How Faithful Catholics May Use the Law at the End of Life
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How Faithful Catholics May Use the Law at the End of Life

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The last time I checked, the mortality rate in this country was still 100%. To die usually involves unavoidable suffering. I don’t think these things will be changing any time soon. This is not a cause for anxiety or dread. Christ our Savior has made death and suffering into pathways to eternal life. “Precious in […]

Transgender Health Experts Contradict Themselves in New Publication
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Transgender Health Experts Contradict Themselves in New Publication

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A leading medical journal published its first series on transgender health and reveals what appear to be major contradictions. On the one hand the journal argues there is nothing medically wrong with transgenderism. On the other hand, it argues transgenderism is a condition that requires medical attention, setting up transgenderism as the first non-medical condition […]

Uterus Transplants Are ‘Supremely Risky’
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Uterus Transplants Are ‘Supremely Risky’

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It was a first in the United States. A woman, only identified as Lindsey, received a uterus from a deceased woman. Lindsey was born without a uterus, and she was hoping this transplant would enable her to get pregnant. At a press conference at the end of February, Cleveland doctors announced it was the first […]

Abortion is Never the Answer for Pregnant Women with Zika
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Abortion is Never the Answer for Pregnant Women with Zika

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Abortion advocates have attempted to lobby and shame pro-life Latin American countries into legalizing abortion for women who may contract the Zika virus. Although it has not been proven that Zika causes microcephaly and other congenital disabilities, pro-abortion groups have nonetheless assumed that it does. Apparently abortion activists think they know more about ZIKV than […]

Proposal to “Rethink” Maternal Health Aims to Leave Mothers Behind
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Proposal to “Rethink” Maternal Health Aims to Leave Mothers Behind

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The position of maternal health as an international priority has changed a lot in the last twenty years. In 1985, leading medical journal The Lancet published an article titled “Maternal Mortality – A Neglected Tragedy: Where is the M in MCH [maternal and child health]?”   Since then, maternal health became a major topic of global […]

Our Not-So Human Future
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Our Not-So Human Future

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Robot soldiers, economic meltdowns, robot lovers, and autonomous drones and weapons—these are just a few of the items that make the list of Tech Republic’s “Ten Terrifying Uses of Artificial Intelligence.” But perhaps the scariest is the prospect of an increased reliance on artificial intelligence for medical treatment. Tech gurus are already pouring billions of dollars—not […]

Mary's Salvation and Ours
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Mary’s Salvation and Ours

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“Have you been saved?” Maybe you have been asked that by one of our Protestant brothers or sisters. If our Blessed Mother had been asked, she could have given the loudest “Yes!” the world had ever heard. Her personal salvation from the stain of Original Sin is celebrated today. Mary praised God’s salvation in her Magnificat and […]

Expanding Acronyms Threaten Maternal and Child Health
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Expanding Acronyms Threaten Maternal and Child Health

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In recent decades, the relatively simple and appealing concept of maternal and child health (MCH) has ballooned into a far broader and more convoluted agenda: sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health, with an unwieldy acronym to match: SRMNCAH. The addition of new letters and target areas have brought a wide range of new […]

Why are the Middle-Aged Dying?
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Why are the Middle-Aged Dying?

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By now there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the disturbing study from Princeton economists showing that middle-aged white Americans are the only demographic showing increasing death rates. Only the 45-54 age segment, and only in the United States. Worse yet, the rise in deaths is due to suicide and substance abuse. One of the […]

When Death Knocked on Her Husband’s Door
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When Death Knocked on Her Husband’s Door

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Beth stared out the hospital blinds as the sunrise crept through. The beauty of it did not register with her as her thoughts raced, wondering how her husband was doing, and how long it would be until things were back to normal. Finally, the doctor came in. “Please step out into the hallway with me,” […]

True Strength: Fully Rely on God
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True Strength: Fully Rely on God

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Like many first-born children, I’m a good rules-follower. Unless I suspect danger to my physical or spiritual well-being, I will do what I’m told by people who love me or the people who somehow make or enforce the rules. So I always have been a pretty good “kneeler” in church. By that, I mean that […]

WHO Researchers Urge Cheaper Abortion Above Safety
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WHO Researchers Urge Cheaper Abortion Above Safety

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As part of an ongoing effort to maximize the international availability of abortion, researchers collaborating with the World Health Organization (WHO) released a study arguing that clinical follow-up after a chemical abortion is unnecessary, and that foregoing it could “save resources.” “This study was done in accordance with the WHO safe abortion guidance, which recommends […]

Using the Catholic Faith As Part of Recovery
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Using the Catholic Faith As Part of Recovery

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Being Catholic is a walk with resolutions. Every confession and examination of conscious ends with the resolve to do better. Although real changes don’t come easy, we rely on God’s mercy and begin again after each fall. But add in an addiction and failing becomes habitual and can cause a person feel like he is […]

The Trouble With Uterus Transplants
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The Trouble With Uterus Transplants

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Last week doctors in Sweden announced the birth of a baby after a uterus transplant. The baby is so far healthy being born at only 31 weeks gestation. I am very happy that mother and baby are healthy enough to leave the hospital and I wish them continued health. I  also wish that this procedure […]

Boomers vs. Millenials
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Boomers vs. Millenials

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There have been countless recent articles analyzing the millennial generation and its distinctive characteristics, but too many are ignoring an upcoming conflict that could define the generation: the aging baby boomers are going to be a big problem for millennials and their parents in the coming decades. In the U.S., the baby boomers are nearing […]

An Open Discussion About Suicide Might Save Someone's Life
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An Open Discussion About Suicide Might Save Someone’s Life

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Funny, talented, wealthy, generous, admired people aren’t supposed to want to die. People are supposed to live beyond the age of 63, Robin Williams’ age when he died August 11. People aren’t supposed to die by suicide. Yet, Williams is no different from thousands of other Americans who die that way. More than 39,000 people […]

Including People with Schizophrenia
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Including People with Schizophrenia

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My wife, LaRee, never knew her maternal grandmother: Her name was Dora and she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Dora was institutionalized in a mental hospital in 1932 at 34 years of age. Eighty-two years ago the shame and stigma of having a family member in a mental institution was so great that few people in the family […]

Melinda Gates Wants to Help Women Around the World
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Melinda Gates Wants to Help Women Around the World

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So Why is the Wife of Microsoft Founder Raising Billions to Inject Them with Depo-Provera? Surely, Mrs. Gates would not have chosen this course if she knew the serious risks of Depo-Provera and if anyone—her Catholic parents, her Catholic high school teachers at the Ursuline Academy in Dallas or her parish priests (she attends Mass […]

Countercultural Revolutionaries
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Countercultural Revolutionaries

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Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week was July 20-26, with the theme “Natural Family Planning: It’s Worth It. Join the Revolution!” – taken from an address of Pope Francis at World Youth Day 2013. The Holy Father asked the assembled youth to see marriage and family life in a new light and “to be revolutionaries” […]