The Pentagon Seeks Inner Peace
The Pentagon and peace: not two words you see in the same sentence too often. Wired’s Katie Drummond goes inside the Pentagon’s Alt-Medicine mecca, where the generals meditate:
The general is surprisingly good at meditation. It’s not just the impeccable posture — that might be expected of a man long used to standing at attention. It’s his hands, which rest idly on his knees, and his combat boots, which remain planted firmly on the floor. Over the next several minutes, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Surgeon General of the Army, will keep his eyes closed and his face perfectly relaxed.
Few in this hotel conference room, where three dozen have assembled to mark the 10th anniversary of the Samueli Institute, a research organization specializing in alternative therapies, are able to match Schoomaker’s stillness.
Even as our first speaker implores that we “close [our] eyes … feel the chair, feel the air, feel the…
Europe To Outlaw Hundreds Of Herbal Health Products
Count this one as a sweeping victory for Big Pharma: regulations set to go into effect across Europe this year will ban hundreds of herbal medicines in one fell swoop. I appreciate the EU’s effort to keep people safe from untested substances, but is it really possible that echinacea could be any more hazardous than, say, prescription antidepressants? The Independent reports:
Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law.
With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades. From May 1, 2011, traditional herbal medicinal products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004. The directive was introduced in response to rising concern over adverse…
