Recently I heard that a family member in her early 50s was being seen by a doctor for DVT and that she was hoping that there was a more natural way of dealing with it than the medications her doctor was prescribing. When I had digested this scrap of family ''information,'' I thought about my own lax position (denial, really) and how it would make sense for me to make some changes in my life while I still have some shreds of health and potential fitness. And, of course, I have inherited my mother's compulsive pop reading habit (in my case, the Internet mostly). So, I decided to research and write an article that would incorporate some preventative and alternative health principles into my life that might make DVT somewhat less likely to catch up with me than is likely the case now. I would also like to see our family member above and others benefit from these principles if they decide that they want to. Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a critical health concern that af
In March sometime, our son Conrad did a hard prune on our old apple tree. We estimate that it is probably around 40 years old and hasn't been given a trim for a couple of years. Then at the end of March, he received 17 different apple scions (shoots of original apple trees) that he had ordered from the Salt Spring Apple Company (which grows over 400 varieties of apples on their farm on Salt Spring Island). He waited for a nice day, weather-wise, warm and sunny, and spent an hour or two using a special grafting tape to wire these little twigs (what they looked like to me) to the branches around the tree. He labeled each sion with fridge tape first, and then with metal tags he made from aluminum pop tins and twist-tied them to the branches with their scion. The aluminum tags will continue to be readable after rain (and we live in a rainy area). Each apple variety will (ideally) sprout its own little sideways-growing tree, probably in a year or so. The plan forward is to nurture th