New Habitude program at Turning Point!

By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News October 30, 2011
A decade after Canada legalized the medical use of marijuana, most doctors are still refusing to sign the declarations patients need to get legal access to pot — meaning patients in pain risk being jailed if they use a drug that helps them function.

It’s a predicament that threatens to become worse because of proposed changes to how Health Canada regulates access to the drug.

At first glance, it appears the government is easing up on strict rules for obtaining medicinal marijuana. Health Canada has proposed removing itself as the ultimate arbiter in approving or rejecting applications to possess.

Instead, doctors alone would sign off on requests.

But the nation’s largest doctors’ group said the proposals would have the perverse effect of putting even greater pressure on MDs to control access to a largely untested and unregulated substance they know little to nothing about; a drug that hasn’t gone through the normal regulatory review process. Their licensing bodies have told doctors that they are under no obligation to complete a medical declaration under the current regulations and that any one who chooses to do so should “proceed with caution.”

Dr. John Haggie, president of the 75,000-member Canadian Medical Association, said the changes being proposed would essentially off load all responsibility for using and monitoring marijuana to the doctors who sign an authorization — “and they’d be kind out of out there, without any infrastructure around them to assess it, to monitor it and to know if they were doing the right thing.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate or fair,” he said.

Observers said doctors fear doing harm, exposing themselves to legal action and becoming the “go-to” source for people seeking pot not to alter their pain but to alter their consciousness.

Haggie said physicians want fundamental research into some basic questions — is it safe? Who does it work for? Who should not use it? Yet the Conservative government abruptly terminated a medicinal marijuana research program in 2006. According to Health Canada, the government believes clinical research is “best undertaken by the private sector, such as pharmaceutical companies.”

A world leader in cannabis research said the logic defies him.

“I cannot imagine how a government agency can supervise (a marijuana access) program knowing that there is very little data out there — on safety issues in particular — and not try to stimulate research,” said Dr. Mark Ware, head of the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids, a non-profit network of more than 150 clinicians and researchers investigating the potential role of cannabinoids in diseases from arthritis to glaucoma.

No drug company wants to evaluate smoked marijuana as a medicine, Ware said, because there’s no money in it for them. Funding agencies have been less than approachable, he added, because there’s little appetite to support studies involving a product that’s often smoked. In clinical parlance, “They don’t see it as a safe, viable drug delivery system,” said Ware, director of clinical research at the Alan Edwards Pain Management Unit at the McGill University Health Centre.

Ware said he wonders how much the government’s disinterest in research might be tied to its tough-on-crime political agenda — “that somehow facilitating research on medicinal cannabis is a way of accepting that it may have some value as a medicine.”

The Montreal doctor, who is helping reform medical school curricula to better educate physicians around pain, received about $2 million under the now-dead medicinal marijuana research program. In a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year that involved 21 patients with neuropathic pain — a common and dreaded condition that causes electric, stabbing pain — Ware’s group found that smoked cannabis at low doses reduces pain, improves mood and helps sleep, without making people high. All had “refractory” pain, meaning pain that had defied all traditional treatments. No serious or unexpected side effects were reported.

Ware avoids prescribing cannabis to patients with a history of psychosis or schizophrenia, because it’s psychoactive at high doses — and sometimes even therapeutic doses. It can also be dangerous to people with unstable heart disease.

Still, there has never been a proven overdose death caused by marijuana in humans, according to Ontario’s highest court. Ware said that for patients for whom it works, cannabis can achieve about 30 per cent reduction in pain intensity.

But doctors remain wary — their chief concern being: How do I know when a patient is seeking a licence for a legitimate medical purpose and not simply to get legal access to an otherwise illicit drug?

Ware’s consortium has been working hard to educate and support doctors around the use of cannabis. He said data from Health Canada suggest that the average medical user is consuming two grams per day — about four joints when smoked. “It’s just taking that information and getting it into the hands of practising physicians. Then at least they know what the ballpark is.”

Some patients were getting authorizations for far higher amounts, because doctors didn’t know that 30 or 40 grams a day could be outside the “normal” range, he said.

Health Canada said the proposed changes to the program — which would include removing the rights of patients to grow their own supply of marijuana or to appoint designated growers, forcing users to get their pot from a licensed commercial producer instead — would make the program less complicated for seriously ill Canadians.

Paul Lewin begs to differ.

Doctors already are boycotting the program en masse, the Toronto lawyer said. Lewin said medical regulators and insurers sent letters to the government, “saying, ‘Don’t put us in charge, don’t make us a gatekeeper, we don’t know anything about pot, this is a plant product, it’s an unapproved drug.’ ”

Lewin said the court heard stories of how some doctors encouraged their patients to use pot for their pain. The patients would return, reporting that the marijuana was helping, that they were feeling less pain. But when they asked the doctors to sign their forms, “that’s when the mood changes,” Lewin said.

“That’s when they say, ‘Get out. I’m not risking my practice over you.’ ”

Lewin’s client, Matt Mernagh, started growing marijuana when he found it provided some relief from chronic pain and other symptoms of scoliosis, fibromyalgia and epilepsy. But he couldn’t get a licence to grow, because he couldn’t find a doctor to sign his declaration.

Police found Mernagh’s plants in 2008 when they were in his apartment building on an unrelated call. He was charged with production.

Lewin took the case to the Superior Court in Ontario. The court declared the federal medical marijuana program unconstitutional. The case is scheduled to go to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in March.

Lewin said the proposed changes to the marijuana access program are likely to scare off some of the few doctors willing to sign declarations, meaning “more seriously ill, law-abiding Canadians will be wrongfully treated as criminals” and subjected to humiliating arrests, medicine seizures and possibly even jailed, he said.

Ware said doctors need education and guidance. They would need to know whether patients who come seeking a licence for medical pot have been arrested for trafficking or diversion in the past. Abuses of the designated production licenses have occurred and Ware believes they should be phased out. But the consortium of cannabinoid researchers said that it’s not only easier and cheaper for patients to grow their own supply but the act of growing their own “medicine” may be therapeutic in itself. “It gives them a sense of control and ownership of their health and treatments.”

Read more: http://www.canada.com/health/Doctors+refuse+authorize+leaving+patients+pain/5630488/story.html#ixzz1cOjviVFz

-By Angel True

The human body is an amazing piece of equipment which is intimately controlled by an even more amazing piece of equipment - our brain. Not so coincidentally this is where our emotions are formed as well. Is it so unreasonable a stretch to think that there might be a link between the two?

You’ve heard it all before no doubt - the mind and body connection. It’s the latest craze and the hippest subject. It’s so over talked right now, or people just assume you get it, that you almost can’t turn anywhere in the alternative world or even the mainstream world these days without someone wanting to talk about, engage or utilize this connection. My own coaching practice is based on this concept of mind and body connection and I too have somewhat taken it for granted that people understood what that meant and how it worked.

Recently I’ve been recovering from a fairly serious chronic neck and shoulder injury that knocked me out of regular activity and down to basic survival mode for nearly 2 months due to the pain level. In the process of identifying and healing the injury I’ve had to come to a much deeper level of understanding and awareness of my own mind and body connection to see where my physical and emotional injuries relate - and heal both in order to deal with the problem.

In the process of doing so I’ve begun to re-evaluate my own use and awareness of this connection. It’s one thing to profess a “body awareness” and another to profess an “emotional consciousness” - but what is required to profess a true “mind and body connection”?

For me, truly understanding the mind and body connection began in assessing the management and understanding of my own “pain”. The connection was in understanding my processing and carrying of external judgment and emotional hurt and correlating it with how my body was acting to create my neck and shoulder injury. At first this was a difficult thing for me to really understand - that emotional pain was creating physical injury - but with a little effort I began to see the interrelationship.

What I noticed was that when the pain is physical you can notice it exists rather quickly - your body is full of nerve endings and pain receptors. Your body is designed to understand and communicate the source of physical injury to you in a fairly efficient manner. If it’s an acute or urgent pain your autonomic responses take over and your body reflexively moves away. If it’s less acute your pain receptors still tell you something is wrong which gives you the ability to identify the source fairly rapidly and find a way to deal with the issue.

Emotional pain doesn’t have nearly the same amount of obvious indicators as physical pain does - though they are still there - nor do they serve the same purpose. If you are suffering from extreme emotional pain caused by obvious trauma or abuse there are fairly distinct behavioral characteristics that can be noticed.
Because of the acute nature of these emotional injuries the indicator behaviors are usually somewhat easy to identify by a trained professional, and if severe enough you can probably identify them in others easily without that training and maybe even yourself.

Just like physical pain, with the proper treatment emotional pain and injuries can be managed and even mostly eliminated. However, unlike physical pain which is designed to show you exactly where the injury is emotional pain and the subsequent indicators is often more designed to mask the pain or avoid future injury.

This much had always felt pretty simple and obvious to me, but what I didn’t really understand was the deeper level that chronic and severe pain interacts at. This is where my own personal process of understanding the mind and body connection began to shift and expand.
If you’ve ever had to manage through chronic physical pain then you know that it’s just about one of the worst things to have to deal with in life - especially if it’s extreme pain. But what about your emotional pain? Emotional pain is a bit different and often more complex but it can be equally excruciating to deal with. Of course, in order to truly understand the mind and body connection you must see where and how these different pains go together and are inter-related.

In addition to just hurting, a lot, chronic physical pain has a way of sapping your strength and pulling you down both physically and emotionally. If it gets bad enough it can start affecting your work, your personal life, and your sleep. Every moment becomes about managing, easing and doing anything you can to escape the pain. When you hurt that much no amount of emotional “cheer me up” will do the trick for more than a few minutes or hours at a time - it just hurts.

Though severe emotional pain has some obvious behavioral patterns, even less acute emotional issues still have indicators that help identify where the pain comes from. As noted though, these behavior indicators serve a slightly different purpose than physical pain. Emotional pain reactions serve to distract you from and avoid the real emotional pain. What is often neglected though is how damaging and how painful these less acute emotional issues and behavior patterns can be. In a time of “be tough” and “pop a pill” in order to get better the management of the underlying physical and emotional issues, and their connection, frequently gets overlooked or simply ignored.

Now of course you know that a good support group of friends and family can help tremendously. Of course you also know that therapy can be extremely helpful and effective if applied appropriately with someone that understands the issue and the effective reframing and treatment options.
But what may get neglected is connecting the two. To begin to understand the mind and body connection a little better in your own body try one or both of these exercises:

Mind/Body Exercise 1 - Emotion Focus:

Sit comfortably and allow yourself to reach a place of calm. Focus on an emotional issue that is currently relevant and present for you. Without trying to understand or solve this emotional issue just begin to feel the emotion. As you begin to have the emotional experience notice what sensations in your body come up. Notice any pains, tingling sensations, hot or cold spots, or anything else that feels different than usual or suddenly calls for your attention. When you identify one or more spots of physical sensation focus your attention on those areas. Using your breath as a tool, imagine that you are sending oxygen and energy into those locations. Take several deep, long, slow breathes - at least 3-5 but as many as you need. Notice what happens to that physical sensation as you do this. Does it dissipate, intensify, shift or move around? Now notice what is happening with the emotional issue you focused on. Does it feel lighter, less important, easier to manage, transformed to a deeper level, or become something new?
When you are done gently allow yourself to relax and breath normally. Take some time to relax and come back to full presence.

Mind/Body Exercise 2 - Body Focus:

Again, sit comfortably and allow yourself to reach a place of calm. Scan through your body to identify any unusual sensations like you did in Exercise 1. Leave your mind calm and relaxed and using your breath as a tool again send oxygen and energy into those locations you identified. What begins to happen to those sensations? Do you notice any emotions or thoughts coming up for you? If you begin to notice emotions arise move towards them and feel them more but without trying to understand or solve the issue. As you begin to feel the emotion notice what happens. Do the sensations in your body change? Does your awareness of the emotion begin to shift or deepen? Follow the emotion wherever it takes you and again notice how the sensations in your body relate to this shift.

When you are done gently allow yourself to relax and breath normally. Take some time to relax and come back to full presence.
At first you might find it difficult to really make the correlation between the physical sensation and the emotional content. With time and practice though, you’ll find it more obvious and easier to do. What you are likely to discover is that emotional pain can be treated with physical awareness and vice versa - to a certain extent.

With emotional pain what is often overlooked is the fact that even low levels of simple daily issues can have a much broader and more severe impact than an equal amount of physical pain. What is also neglected is that emotional and physical pain have a connection that runs very deep and is often not acknowledged. What is important to understand about this mind and body connection is how subtle it can be, especially if you aren’t paying attention. While we have an easy and readily available ability to identify physical pain with physical injury the relationship between emotional pain and emotional injury are much harder to identify. It is this very connection that you will need to foster in order to truly engage the mind and body connection.

Just like chronic pain can affect your life and pull you down, so to can emotion pain. The difference is that you may just not notice it as much. Depression and anxiety - two emotions nearly everyone has experienced at some point - are the easiest examples to understand their impact on your life. When you are depressed or anxious your energy level, mood, appetite and sex drive can all be affected. Most of us have made this connection even if we don’t know what to do about it all the time. Notice how the symptoms of emotional pain are physical in nature? Even though the actual injury is something else such as stress, loneliness or other emotional challenges - it manifests the injury as depression or anxiety that also expresses as physical symptoms.

With physical and emotional pain the difference is that you usually have great clarity about addressing physical pain - but your awareness and understanding of emotional pain might be vastly more complicated. If you’re anything like the typical human your mind can play tricks on you by hiding and masking the true emotional issue. While you might think it’s “just depression” the reality might be that there’s a deeper issue of holding onto judgment, feelings of abandonment, fears of inadequacy, self-esteem issues or any of a number of other significant emotional issues that regularly occur in our modern lives that are driving and fueling the depression or anxiety.

The other difference with the emotional pain is that more often than not you may allow yourself to continue to suffer without addressing the deeper issue, releasing the pain or solving the problem that created the emotion. You do this because of the masking effect of emotional pain. This can be just as draining and exhausting as chronic physical pain. In our modern society we’ve simply learned to “cope” with this emotional pain and sense of disconnection that follows.

What is most important to understand though is not just how physical and emotional pain manifest but how one can manifest as the other. This is where your newfound skills and understanding of the mind and body connection can begin to address the issue with more success, as it did in my own process of healing. As stated earlier, nearly every physical pain or injury has an emotional component to it.

For me the weight of carrying external judgment and emotional hurt was borne by my shoulders. Over a long period of time of carrying and denying this pain and injury my body adjusted and compensated by hunching over and tightening up as a protection from the pain. After a particularly difficult period of time of holding these issues my body finally gave way to physical injury. The correlation was realized and my body found a way of getting my attention I couldn’t ignore. It manifested my emotional injury as a physical pain with clear indicators I couldn’t ignore.

In order to heal both the emotional and physical pain you must begin to make the connection and treat both of them simultaneously. By using your mind and body awareness begin to notice where these pains interrelate. In my body I had to learn to release these old emotions and patterns and build new structures for accepting and allowing these interactions to roll off of me more lightly. I also had to work on taking the physical steps necessary to heal the physical injury. It is only in completely engaging this mind and body connection that I have been able to slowly begin to heal both my mind and my body - but it still takes time and effort.

Take a moment now to go back to the exercises you performed earlier. See if you can identify whether your real pain or injury is emotional or physical. What do you discover if you deal with either the physical or emotional pain separately and how is this different from dealing with both of them simultaneously? By integrating the mind and body connection with both the emotional and physical healing tools you already have, or by seeking help with someone capable of assisting you, you’ll achieve better and more rapid results.

If you give both your mind and body the proper attention the chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, doesn’t have to be chronic anymore! And the best part?

If you deal with the emotional pain now it might not need to manifest as severe physical pain!

See what kind of difference this awareness makes in your life.

You need to “listen deeply” – Listen past what people say they want to hear what they really need.

Anonymous

What actions have you determined are necessities in your life to keep you on track? If you’re desire is for the straight and narrow path to inner happiness, then you must know that in order to achieve this goal you so desire, you must love yourself first and be consistent in every one of your efforts. A few questions you must ask yourself are:

1. What is it that I really want in life?

2. How am I going to acquire these wants?

3. How much passion am I going to put behind my goals?

4. What steps do I need to take in order to achieve these goals?

5. How much time am I willing to take to get the things I want?

After you’ve considered these questions, try taking out a pen and paper, your laptop keyboard, or whatever else you have at your disposal and begin to jot down ideas and thoughts resolving these questions.

Sometimes, we have to make small sacrifices to create a clear passage to the lives we want to lead. While we might like owning that high-maintenance SUV; the payments might be killing us financially. Or, we’ve put several years’ time into a work position only to stay in the same spot. Are you staying in a negative personal relationship because you’ve become accustomed to arguing? Have you seen the writing on the wall? That doesn’t mean you should allow your vehicle to get repossessed, that you should walk out of your relationship, or just outright quit your job because you’re not going anywhere. What it does mean is that you need to re-evaluate your state of affairs, and start using the tools that are available to you to make the best out of a lagging or negative situation. You are, after all, in control of your emotions and your actions. And if you are not–Why not? You cannot control the people around you. But you can control yourself…or better said, you can become the leader of your life–if that is your choice!

That being said, you must determine the necessary actions and efforts to keep your life on track. For example, if you are in a “terrible job”, you need to ask yourself if it is in fact the job that is terrible, or is it the feelings that you associate with the job that give it the appearance of being terrible. When you figure that out, that’s when you can decide what path you need to take in order to acquire a better position…or perhaps, become an entrepreneur in your own field to remove the negativity in your working life. The same holds true in relationships — both personal and professional. Relationships, just like working positions, take time, sacrifice, effort, labor, love, and communication skills. What are you doing in your life to heighten your potential and efficacy in creating and sustaining healthy bonds? And this is also true with professional relationships — how do you view the work you do? Would you “hire you” again? Would you want “you” working for yourself? Think about it. Are you creating your own problems at work?

Beyond work and personal relationships, finances (or lack thereof) often take center stage on the emotional baggage train. Do any of these hypothetical statements apply to you?

* “I can’t go to the gym because I can’t afford it.”

* “I can’t take a vacation because I don’t have the money.”

* “I’d love to take you to that restaurant, but it’s too expensive.”

* “How I wish I could buy a house, but times are tough.”

* “How can John Doe afford such a nice car?”

* “I’d like to have children, but I can barely afford to pay my own bills.”

* “I’m just not lucky like that other guy.”

More than likely, we’ve all encountered one or more of the above situations. And when we are honest with ourselves–it’s uncomfortable, too. Especially when someone asks you to accompany him (or her) and you begin concocting lame excuses as to why you can’t go. And envy is even worse. No matter how successful we become in life, someone, somewhere is going to have something bigger, better, and more expensive than you. That’s a fact. But, the good news is that you don’t have to “keep up with the Jones.” You just have to keep up with yourself — that’s it. Every action has an equal reaction. For instance, if you have made the active decision to remove negativity from your life, what must you do to attain it? If you simply “want” the negativity gone, and do nothing to remove it, then it will remain where it is in your life. Wanting something and doing something for that want are two entirely different means to an end: one is inaction (indecision) and the other is action (decision). No one but you can work towards living your life without negativity. Making the conscience decision to not allow negativity, in any way, into your life will take work which at times may be difficult to achieve but if you set the goal, only you can attain it.

Do you have what it takes? Yes! Almost every individual has the mental, physical, emotional, and psychological capacity to achieve their hearts’ desires; unfortunately, they don’t always do it because of indecision, inaction, and complacency. We get comfortable in all of our relationships, much like we do in our own running shoes. We tend to overlook the holes, the wear and tear, the rips, the shredded laces…because they feel good on our feet. Eventually, our feet get soaked from the puddles that we sometimes have to walk through. Even track stars have to change shoes every now and then to maintain a proper balance and performance. Like it or not, we have to toss the old shoes and buy new ones that fit us and serve us better so that the paths on which we walk will benefit us. Which path do you choose to walk upon? What sacrifices are you willing to make to create forward motion? What choices are you making for you today to promise a healthy and happy tomorrow?

Wishing You Good Health

Brenda Herzog

Your body is exactly like a movie projector, and the film running through the projector is all of your thoughts and feelings. Everything you see on the screen of your life is what has been projected from within you, and is what you have put into the film.

Rhonda Byrne