Voltage blog entries tagged with: Health

Photo: bass_nroll

It's not a hard concept to understand - if you drive less, you're less likely to crash, and therefore live longer. More interesting is that if you drive faster you end up losing time (in a global whole-life sense) to crashes faster than you gain time from going faster. Basically - slow down, it's better for you.

"Time Lost by Driving Fast in the United States"
This study by Professors Donald A. Redelmeier and Ahmed M. Bayoumi indicates that that in the U.S., one hour spent driving was associated with approximately 20 minutes reduction in life expectancy due to crash risk. For the average driver, each one kilometer per hour (0.6-mph) increase in driving speed yielded a 26-second increase in total expected lost time because the savings from reduced travel time were more than offset by time lost to increased crashes.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Photo: javaturtle

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The New York Times has an article about some schools in California and Pennsylvania trying mindfulness techniques with their students to help them calm down, focus, reduce stress, learn better, etc. I'm 110% behind this. I took mindfulness classes a few years ago and I can definitely say that the techniques work. I'd recommend them to everyone and anyone - period.

The class I took used the well known book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, along with some guided 'meditation' type tapes made by our instructor. The class was taught at the integrated-holistic medicine department of the UCSF Hospital in San Francisco. It's not meditation in the traditional sense. Yes, you do have to sit quietly, but it's more than just sitting there. It teaches you a way to clear the mind and help bring you into the present, which is where you need to be to focus on what you are doing now and what is going on around you - to keep you mind from wandering into the past or future which is where worries and stresses live.

People hear about children being abducted on the news what seems like very often these days. So they assume the streets aren't very safe, and as a result, kids don't get the freedom to roam the way that I did when I was young. But are things really the way that they seem - or are people just more paranoid because of their perceptions?

Yes! More pig products are definitely a good thing. (PDF)

The HIPAA laws and those privacy informational notices then you get each time you go to the doctor were put in place to protect the privacy of your medical records. Even President Bush decided it was a good idea when he first came into office. Now his administration, through the Department of Justice seems to have rolled over for the Medical industry and taken the teeth out of the legislation by removing important criminal penalties.