If you grow or use medical marijuana, here is a conference that may be the place for you and an event for you: the Western Slope Cannabis Crown is up for grabs.  And, there’s even a People’s Choice award that will be given to the most popular of cannabis.
The April 17 and 18 event isn’t the first of its kind, it’s patterned after Amsterdam’s Cannabis Cup but it’s not all just fun and games. The serious side to the competition and the conference itself is education and providing an outlet for medicinal marijuana growers be able to showcase the best …read more

There’s not much that is more disgusting than walking into a public bathroom to use the toilet and finding it dirty. I’m not sure what it is about public bathrooms that makes some people act like they’ve never been out before, but sometimes, you really have to wonder if they’ve been taught basic courtesy.
Wanting a clean toilet seat isn’t a lot to ask for. If nature is calling, it often calls quite loudly and women don’t have the option of standing like men do. At home, it’s not quite so bad (I hope) but we still want a clean toilet. …read more

If your teen came to you and said that he or she felt that their sex was wrong, that they identified more with the opposite sex, how do you think you would handle it? Of course, such a question isn’t fair because it’s highly unlikely there weren’t any signs earlier in the child’s life.
There have been stories in the news about children trying to attend school as a member of the opposite sex. Parents of these children have been both attacked and praised for their decisions to allow their cross-gendered children to live in the way they feel is right …read more

Do you have or do you suspect you have Seasonal Affective Disorder? SAD is a disorder that goes beyond the winter blues, just as postpartum depression is more than the baby blues. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, “Seasonal affective disorder (“affective” is a psychiatric term for mood), or SAD, describes people who have these clinical depressions only during the autumn and winter seasons. During the spring and summer, they feel well and “normal”.”
Symptoms of SAD include:

Oversleeping
Extreme fatigue
Increased appetite with carbohydrate craving
Overeating
Weight gain
Suicidal thoughts in extreme cases

Treatment
While antidepressant medications may help some people with SAD, light therapy has been …read more

This isn’t to make light of memory loss, but it is really a surprise to learn that “cognitive fluctuations, or episodes when train of thought temporarily is lost, are more likely to occur in older persons who are developing Alzheimer’s disease than in their healthy peers”? This was the finding of a study by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine and the results were published in the most recent issue of the journal Neurology.
Everyone experiences memory lapses, so having them doesn’t mean that you have Alzheimer’s, but the lapses, staring into space, and daytime sleepiness are found more …read more

Now that New Year’s is a little more than two weeks gone, so are many of the resolutions we’ve made. One of the most common resolutions is to lose weight and, unfortunately, not all of us – men or women – do this in a healthy manner. Another unfortunate situation is that not everyone needs to lose weight and they are at a perfectly healthy weight for their height and body build.
According to the Healthy Weight website,
Healthy Weight Week promotes healthy nondiet lifestyles for children and adults of every size. It helps them move ahead to healthy habits they can …read more

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if a pharmacy provides good service, doesn’t make mistakes and charges fair prices, it is going to get the customers, right? So if it’s so simple, why do some pharmacies have so many problems with patients not being able to pay for their prescriptions, some patients not getting the right prescriptions, and with some staff who just don’t seem to care whether the patient is being served well or not?
They may have to pick up their socks and start to work harder if they are the ones described here because mail-order …read more

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember Mood Rings. They were “stones,” worn on a ring, that changed color according to your mood. They’re still around but they were very popular in the 1970s.
Mood rings supposedly worked because there were liquid crystals inside the quartz that react to body temperature. According to the various charts, here are what the colors were supposed to mean:

violet blue – happy, romantic
blue – calm, relaxed
green – average, not much going on with you
yellow/amber – tense, excited
brown/gray – nervous, anxious
black – cold temperature or damaged ring (dead?) (About.com)

So, why might they make a …read more

Everyone has had the hiccups at some point, right? At first, a little funny, a little annoying. And – have you ever hiccupped in the middle of a yawn? During a meeting?
There are many so-called cures for hiccups, such as:

Pinch the back of your shoulder until it hurts
Hold your breath and count to 20
Gargle
Surgery? (keep reading)

As annoying as hiccups can be, for some people, they don’t go away. The medical term is singultus, although you rarely hear a doctor calling it that. Prolonged hiccups are those that last up to 48 hours, but longer than 48 hours, they are called …read more

Time to open the Duh Study file: Longer Surgeries Mean More Infections, Longer Hospital Stays.
To me, this is pretty obvious. Longer surgeries tend to be more complicated than shorter surgeries. If the surgery is takes long, the body is exposed more. If the surgery is longer and more complicated, it makes sense that it may take longer to recuperate, resulting in a longer hospital stay. Right?
In a study published in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, researchers reported on their study of almost 300,000 surgeries and the patient outcomes.
The researchers looked at 299,359 surgeries …read more