CERTAIN THAT AORTIC ATHEROSCLEROSIS must have been entered in error, I called the healthcare facility, informed a records technician that I’d never even been assessed for heart issues, and asked her to delete the diagnosis from my file. Not surprisingly, she told me that I’d need to discuss the issue with my primary care physician. I’d recently started going to a longevity expert for my annual physical, so I immediately called him and told him about this error. He asked if I’d had a chest x-ray in the past several years— apparently, if you have a calcified plaque in your aorta, this shows up on a chest film—and my blighted heart sank. I had been x-rayed after a bout of Covid. But how could it be that no one had bothered to inform me of this dire-sounding diagnosis? Did I have other health problems that I hadn’t been told about? How serious a condition is aortic atherosclerosis? What should I be doing about it? What I learned over the next few weeks convinced me to change the role I played on my healthcare team.
CURIOSITY CAN LEAD TO CURES
This story is from the Sep/Oct 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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This story is from the Sep/Oct 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.
