Losing Fat Easy and Painless – Too Good to be True?
In an article in today’s Peninsula I learned that I can go in for six treatments, just lie there, no sweat, no starvation diets, and fat can be . . . melted (?) by laser and then massaged away, drained away by my lymphatic system.
It sounds wonderful! No sedation, no risk of infection, no long term ill effects like stomach stapling or banding. The fat just goes away! My dream come true!
I am such a cynic. There is a part of me that just can’t believe it could be that easy. What do you think?
Al Emadi Hospital unveils new technology for fat reduction
Web posted at: 1/6/2010 1:43:36
Source ::: THE PENINSULA
DOHA: Al Emadi Hospital has launched fat reduction services by “Zerona”, the latest device to break down body fats, becoming the first medical facility in Qatar to have the new technology. The technology saves patient a great deal of time and works without any side effects eliminating Cellulite and fat from the skin, embroidering and strengthening the figure without any surgical interference.
“The significant role of the device has been scientifically proven success in detecting fat under the skin and fragmenting its sizes into liquid body fats which can be disposed of. The machine uses cold laser technology to break down the fat cells under the skin in several stages. The results do not appear until after six sessions – around two weeks,” said Dr Mohammed Al Emadi, Director, Al Emadi Hospital.
The body fat broken using cold laser can be disposed through the lymphatic vessels with an added help of several massage sessions.
“It can help to get rid of fats in areas which do not respond to exercise and diet. The device works on the upper and lower limbs, breast and abdomen, neck, back and hips. It helps to dispose of cellulite that leads to distortions in the skin, and helps remove the fat masses in the abdomen and buttocks where a difference can be seen in the outer thigh or waist after the completion of the required sessions,” said Dr Kamal Hussein Saleh, a consultant in medical and plastic surgery and replacements and laser treatments.
A clear change in all clothing measurements has been noted after the sessions, according to Dr Saleh. The fact that it does not cause sudden changes in weight is an added advantage of the device compared with other of laser devices. The device is easy to use and can be used at any time, with no sedation or surgical interference.
Since it is a cold laser, it does not generate any heat or redness on the skin and is makes it possible for the patient to continue normal work after the session. Since the device does not touch with the skin, it is superior to regular lasers which may lead to the transmission of some skin diseases. It does not cause emission of fumes or gases, as it is the case of laser hair removal.
Pomegranate May Fight MRSA?
I found this article on AOL Health News and I am delighted to have any excuse to buy and eat a pomegranate. Now, even more so.
You may think I am overly concerned about MRSA, but I am convinced that it was MRSA that ended up killing my father. He was old, yes, but amazingly resilient and sturdy. He had a fighting spirit, and no matter what happened, he took control of his own “wellness.”
He went in for a routine operation (although few operations are ‘routine’ at 87) and ended up with a horrible infection where his IV had been inserted, an infection that wasn’t caught for about a week. He complained; people thought he was exaggerating. Eventually it was diagnosed as MRSA. He had to go through several rounds of intravenous Vancomycin, each of which lasted 30 days, and, I am convinced, none of which got rid of the infection because a month or so later, it would be roaring back.
What are we doing to ourselves? Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a result of over reliance on antibiotics, and for what? For viral diseases which cannot be cured by an antibiotic!
Eat more pomegranates!
By Katherine Tweed
Stopping the superbug methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has researchers looking for new antibacterial agents in all corners of the globe. Not only are these bacteria difficult treat due to resistance to certain antibiotics, they are especially dangerous because they can be transmitted via casual contact. Scientists at the University of Kingston, Surrey in the UK have found there is promise in pomegranates.
Pomegranates have long been known for their antibacterial and therapeutic health benefits, especially in Brazil. While most of us think of pomegranates as being chock-full of antioxidants, they may fight more than free radicals. A study published in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that when the fruit’s rind is combined with metal salts and vitamin C, they hold promise in killing MRSA.
“It was the mix that fantastically increased the activity — there was synergy, where the combined effects were much greater than those exhibited by individual components,” study author Declan Naughton told the Daily Mail. “It shows nature still has a few tricks up its sleeve.”
Drug-resistant staph infections such as MRSA are a growing problem, primarily in hospital settings. MRSA infections accounted for two percent of staph infections in U.S. hospitals in 1974, but that figure jumped to 63 percent in 2004, according to the CDC.
Don’t reach for the pomegranate lotion just yet, however. The research was done in a lab setting, and it is still in the preliminary stages. Also, pomegranate rind on its own was not able to stop or slow the growth of drug-resistant staph infections. The authors say that while there is potential for pomegranates enhanced with metal salts, further investigation is needed.
Feast of the Epiphany in Doha
Our priest at the Church of the Epiphany has been instructing the children on how the church year differs from the marketing year. While “Christmas” may start in October – or even July! – to merchants eager to sell their wares, for church-going Christians, Christmas starts on Christmas Eve – and is celebrated, each and every day, until the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the Three Wise Men traveling to find the Christ Child in Bethlehem.
“I know what I want for Christmas this year,” I said to my startled friend, “I want you to fix my camel. I have all the things, or most of them, but I haven’t a clue where to start.”
My friend is a very busy woman. She has so much on her plate. But there was not a sign of reluctance on her face. “I LOVE doing camels!” she exclaimed!
“I want it to look like a camel coming with the Wise Men to bring gifts to the Christ Child,” I told her, and she got it without any explanation – yep, gold, frankincense, myrrh . . .
The camel is everything I had dreamed of – and more. She made little bags, she created a treasure chest of gifts, she even included my sewing machine and a coffee grinder!
I have three little Wise Men following the camel, bringing gifts. The Qatteri Cat has inflicted some damage; one is missing a foot and I can’t find it anywhere. I was able to glue a head back on, and a feather on another . . . The Qatteri Cat does not get Epiphany.
A lawyer from Texas A&M did a wonderful film, sent to me by my sweet daughter-in-law’s dear aunt, called The Star in which he presents the result of his research to find scientific evidence that a Star might have stood still over the little city of Bethlehem at the the time pinpointed for the birth of The Christ. It’s an amazing and insightful video, the life work of a devoted man.
Cats Purr Purr-posefully
This study cracks me up. When a cat is catting around you in the morning, it is usually because they are hungry, and they want you to feed them. If you get up and feed them, you have just encouraged them to bother you. YOU train the cat to bother you! The Qatteri Cat knows I won’t get up and feed him until I am ready. With me, he will purr, but he settles down and waits for me to get up – and feed him. LOL, I guess he has me trained, too.
From today’s BBC News:
Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.
Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a “soliciting purr” to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.
Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a “cry”, with a similar frequency to a human baby’s.
The team said cats have “tapped into” a human bias – producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.
Dr Karen McComb, the lead author of the study that was published in the journal Current Biology, said the research was inspired by her own cat, Pepo.
“He would wake me up in the morning with this insistent purr that was really rather annoying,” Dr McComb told BBC News.
“After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning.”
While miaowing might get a cat expelled from the bedroom, Dr McComb said that this pestering purr often convinced beleaguered pet lovers to get up and fill their cat’s bowl.
To find out why, her team had to train cat owners to make recordings of their own cats’ vocal tactics – recording both their “soliciting purrs” and regular, “non-soliciting” purrs.
“When we played the recordings to human volunteers, even those people with no experience of cats found the soliciting purrs more urgent and less pleasant,” said Dr McComb.
How annoying?
She and her team also asked the volunteers to rate the different purrs – giving them a score based on how urgent and pleasant they perceived them to be.
“We could then relate the scores back to the specific purrs,” explained Dr McComb. “The key thing (that made the purrs more unpleasant and difficult to ignore) was the relative level of this embedded high-frequency sound.”
“When an animal vocalises, the vocal folds (or cords) held across the stream of air snap shut at a particular frequency,” explained Dr McComb. The perceived pitch of that sound depends on the size, length and tension of the vocal folds.
“But cats are able to produce a low frequency purr by activating the muscles of their vocal folds – stimulating them to vibrate,” explained Dr McComb.
Since each of these sounds is produced by a different mechanism, cats are able to embed a high-pitched cry in an otherwise relaxing purr.
“How urgent and unpleasant the purr is seems to depend on how much energy the cat puts into producing that cry,” said Dr McComb.
Previous studies have found similarities between a domestic cat’s cry and the cry of a human baby – a sound that humans are highly sensitive to.
Dr McComb said that the cry occurs at a low level in cats’ normal purring. “But we think that (they) learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.”
She added that the trait seemed to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners.
“Obviously we don’t know what’s going on inside their minds,” said Dr McComb. “But they learn how to do this, and then they do it quite deliberately.”
So how does Dr McComb feel about Pepo now she knows he has been manipulating her all these years?
“He’s been the inspiration for this whole study, so I’ll forgive him – credit where credit’s due.”
Mermaid Fabric
One of the things my friend and I were seeking on our Souk Quest was mermaid fabric. My friend has a grand daughter who loves to be The Little Mermaid, and I knew that the exact right fabric existed in the souk, I had seen it and didn’t have any excuse to buy it.
We found it. It is perfect – sea green, and shiny scales:
Doha is full of wonderful fabrics for dress-up.
Crab Cakes in Doha
We wanted to have a light dinner at home to welcome our house guests, and then take them on a night-tour of Doha. I remembered the wonderful Crab Cakes my friend and her daughter made in Seattle, and I was determined to have . . . well, I knew it wouldn’t be the same, but something LIKE those crab cakes.
So I found the best crab I could buy in Doha, and made up the crab cakes. Wrong crab. Wrong breading – I couldn’t find any panko (I know there is panko in Doha, I just know it, but I couldn’t find it when I was looking for it!) so I whirled up some lime Tostito chips in the food processor and used those.
They were actually pretty good, when I first made them. Not the same, not Pacific Northwest Dungeness Crab, but not bad.
This is four cans of crab meat – you can find the recipe for Crab Cakes by clicking on the blue type; I already printed it back in August or September.
The crushed tostitos weren’t bad for breading, but you only use a little, on the outside, to help them firm up for cooking:
I served them with Plum Sauce, which also wasn’t as good as the fresh home-made plum sauce my friend’s daughter made:
They were OK. If I didn’t know what Pacific Northwest Crab tasted like, fresh out of the ocean and steamed right away, I probably would have thought they were pretty good. I’m not going to make them again here.
Wikipedia Today
I found this story in Time Magazine where you can read the rest of the story by clicking on the blue type. Wikipedia has been a great source of information for me, and I am fascinated to know Wikipedia’s growth is slowing – and why . .
Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?
By FARHAD MANJOO
Looking back, it was naive to expect Wikipedia’s joyride to last forever. Since its inception in 2001, the user-written online encyclopedia has expanded just as everything else online has: exponentially. Up until about two years ago, Wikipedians were adding, on average, some 2,200 new articles to the project every day. The English version hit the 2 million — article mark in September 2007 and then the 3 million mark in August 2009 — surpassing the 600-year-old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia as the largest collection of general knowledge ever compiled (well, at least according to Wikipedia’s entry on itself).
But early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia’s growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages. “When we first noticed it, we thought it was a blip,” says Ed Chi, a computer scientist at California’s Palo Alto Research Center whose lab has studied Wikipedia extensively. But Wikipedia peaked in March 2007 at about 820,000 contributors; the site hasn’t seen as many editors since. “By the middle of 2009, we realized that this was a real phenomenon,” says Chi. “It’s no longer growing exponentially. Something very different is happening now.”
What stunted Wikipedia’s growth? And what does the slump tell us about the long-term viability of such strange and invaluable online experiments? Perhaps that the Web has limits after all, particularly when it comes to the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing. Wikipedians — the volunteers who run the site, especially the approximately 1,000 editors who wield the most power over what you see — have been in a self-reflective mood. Not only is Wikipedia slowing, but also new stats suggest that hard-core participants are a pretty homogeneous set — the opposite of the ecumenical wiki ideal. Women, for instance, make up only 13% of contributors. The project’s annual conference in Buenos Aires this summer bustled with discussions about the numbers and how the movement can attract a wider class of participants.
At the same time, volunteers have been trying to improve Wikipedia’s trustworthiness, which has been sullied by a few defamatory hoaxes — most notably, one involving the journalist John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia entry falsely stated that he’d been a suspect in the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations. They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head — but those changes will become live only once they’ve been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator. “Few articles on Wikipedia are more important than those that are about people who are actually walking the earth,” says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the encyclopedia. “What we want to do is find ways to be more fair, accurate, and to do better — to be nicer — to those people.”
Yet that gets to Wikipedia’s central dilemma. Chi’s research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos — that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding to its corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy. “It may be that the bureaucracy is inevitable when a project like this becomes sufficiently important,” Chi says. But who wants to participate in a project lousy with bureaucrats?
There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia’s slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world’s species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else — well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are “janitorial” — making sure that articles are well formatted and readable.
Read the rest of the article Here
Taqueria Guayamas
I have to admit it, I am repeating myself. When I find a really good place, I go back again and again. How can you miss, when you know a place is really really great?
I had to back to the Taqueria Guayamas, but this time I was determined NOT to order the same things I always order, but to make myself try something new.
Oh no! There were no customers in front of me, so as I am looking at the menu, trying to make myself not order the same things I have had before and the man is asking what I want and I don’t know, so I order the (something) verde, and he asks if I want the plate or the burrito so I say the burrito.
When the burrito comes, it is totally delicious:
(I think part of the green in the green sauce is avocado!)
One of the things I dream about while living in Kuwait or Qatar is the selection of home made salsas – I choose a fiery pepper sauce, and a smokey fiery pepper sauce:
These salsas are both out of this world. If you are not a fiery salsa fan, not to worry, they have about eight to choose from, and some are very mild.
This is one side of the Taqueria Guayamas menu:
I really, really, REALLY need a Taqueria Guayamas in Doha!
Here There and Anywhere
It’s not like “Here, There and Everywhere” is something I made up and trademarked. No. It was an old Beatles song I liked a lot:
And when I started blogging, I couldn’t think of one area I wanted to specialize in, like news commenting, or recipes, and my life isn’t so fascinating that I can just spin tales and keep you dazzled, so Here There and Everywhere just sort of expressed the serendipity that I wanted, and gave me the space that I needed to tackle lots of subjects – and, more important, to me anyway, to get feedback and input from others who might know a whole lot more than I do about things. I was always ready for things to take a wild jag, and, to my utter delight, they sometimes do. 🙂
It’s worked for me. It keeps life interesting.
But I have to admit I sometimes get a twinge of proprietary feeling about the name. One time BitJockey sent me a reference to a blog – a Kuwait blog! and the author had a name so similar that if it was a coincidence, it was a very eerie coincidence. It sort of totally annoyed me, but I didn’t want to give the blog any attention or thought at all, and actually, so far ignoring it has pretty much worked for me, too.
But today, in my very own home town, I saw this big orange van:
“Oh!” I said! “Oh, Look at that van! It says ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ on it!” and my Mom said “Oh, that’s the Here and There and Anywhere Grill” and we order things from them all the time. They are only here on Wednesdays. After two or three weeks,” she added, “I get a little tired of the food and then stop for a while and start again later. They have really good food.”
I love it that Mom is stepping out, taking college seminars, ordering from the Here and There and Anywhere Grill, doing her physical therapy, keeping active.
“How can I help you, Mom?” I asked, and she had a good list ready. At the end was “Buy a new chair” so today we went searching for the perfect chair. In one store, we were the only customers so the saleslady suggested we push Mom around the huge, cavernous store in a dining room chair with wheels. Only problem is Mom has to hold her feet up off the floor, it’s not like a wheelchair with a base you can rest your feet on, but she was a really good sport, except for the one time maybe I was moving too fast and I hit an edge of carpet and almost dumped her by stopping too abruptly.
She found a totally great chair, one I don’t think my Dad would have approved of at all. I love it that she made the decision herself, and bought the chair and it is going to be delivered tomorrow – a gorgeous cherry RED leather chair. Wooo HOOOO on you, Mom! 😀
(You are going to have to imagine the cherry red part; the only photo I could find online is black.)
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