Is It Possible To Apply ?Pet Assisted Therapy? For The Sake Of ...

Is It Possible To Apply ?Pet Assisted Therapy? For The Sake Of Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness And Meniere?s Disease Sufferers?

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 | CAUSES OF ANXIETY ATTACKS News

Many scientists dream of developing a standard medication that will cure all Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness and Meniere?s Disease sufferers. This goal was not achieved yet. In the meantime there are two ways to help the patients: a Palliative treatment (a treatment that helps to relieve the symptoms), and Curative treatment for some types of these medical conditions, such as infection, benign tumors or Metabolic Abnormalities (Dr. Z. Shemesh from the Hadassah Hospital approach).

Hypnotherapy, meditation, biofeedback and hydrotherapy are known therapies that help the sufferers to relax, but are not curative. Pet assisted therapy may be included in the therapies that induce relaxation, and even more then that.

Out of the long list of pets, dogs and cats are far more popular among those who wish to raise their pet at home. Horses are preferred by people who like open spaces for their therapy. I gave a higher priority to dogs because of their popularity and variable dog breeds and types that are available today.

Pets can be classified to trained and untrained animals. The trained animals study how to be calm, gentle and well mannered, especially around rambunctious children. The untrained pets should be basically calm with gentle nature and have a people-oriented personality. They must love attention and petting and not be shy. In addition, the trained and untrained animals need basic obedience training and should be conditioned to sudden noises. These pets are going to have a more spontaneous adaptation to their owner. They provide an invaluable service to those who are lonely, abandoned, or ill; indeed, anyone who needs the miraculous healing that can arise from a hug and a gentle touch.

When the owner of the pet is sick, many of the pets have the intuition to do the right thing.

Pets truly have the power to heal their owners, especially the elderly. The most serious disease for older people is not cancer or heart disease, but loneliness.

The decision of choosing the right animal for a patient is hard. There is no logic, for instance, in taking a 75 year old man who never had experience of riding horses, and put him on the back of a horse. It is risky, and even anti therapeutic for such a patient. Even if you offer him a good tempered horse. The pet assisted therapist should be professional.

Important component of the clinical picture in the sufferers of Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness and Meniere?s Disease is their anxiety, stress and distress. Various therapies may include relaxation, but Pet Assisted Therapy may contribute much more then that.

Dogs:

The dog is considered the best friend of man. It is a well known slogan. Dogs notably have a calming effect on humans. They accept individuals as they are and help them to cope with the emotional issues that are associated with anxiety. They use their sound and nonverbal communication with humans in order to establish friendly relations. They also offer physical contact with man and help to divert a person?s attention from their pressing daily problems.?

Dogs rely on their owners for feeding, walking, attention and love. It may help sufferers from various medical conditions such as chronic pain, Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, patients who need neurological rehabilitation, post MI patients, post surgical condition, especially orthopedic, and recovery from depression. Relief of anxiety and depression.

Small dogs are good because they can be lifted easily and fit even on the smallest laps.

A large dog makes a good companion for someone in a wheelchair, sitting patiently and allowing the occupant to stroke his fur. Dogs have high intelligence for emotions and genuinely want to provide companionship and comfort. When needed, they are both intuitive and compassionate. They love almost everyone without any degree of rejection. You can not refuse to play with this friendly pet when he comes to you.

I looked for scientific trials with ?Pet Therapy? for the sake of sufferers from Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness or Meniere?s Disease, but the only ?PET? that I found in the search engine was: Positron Emission Tomography.

Cats

Cats are good. They also can be lifted easily and fit even on the smallest laps.

They provide an invaluable service to those who are lonely, abandoned, or ill. Indeed, anyone who needs the miraculous healing that can arise from a hug and a gentle touch can have a cat.

Children, especially those who are abused or neglected, are able to communicate with animals. A pet offers a safe place for a child with emotional problems. They give unconditional love, providing a security blanket.

A cat (and some other animals) can be the bond that glues a family together when upheaval, such as moving, death or divorce, occurs. Often, an animal can reach a child beyond an adult?s touch.

Horses

Therapeutic Horseback Riding is a form of physical therapy for people who have a range of disabilities including physical, emotional, cognitive, and social difficulties.

Because the gait of a horse when walking is a gentle, repetitive movement, it moves the rider?s body in way that is very similar to the human gait; physically disabled riders often achieve greater flexibility, muscle strength, and balance. This type of therapy can improve balance, posture, mobility and reactive time.

I chose to present this kind of therapy because of the availability of farms with trained horses, and the accumulation of experience in this therapeutic approach. No offense to all the other good riding animals such as donkeys, camels or elephants.

Therapeutic Horseback Riding can benefit people with a wide range of individual challenges and disabilities, including:

Orthopedic Disorders: Amputation or Spinal Cord Injury.

Neurological Disorders: Brain Injury, Seizure Disorders, Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson?s Disease Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Spina Bifida, Stroke patients, isual and Hearing Impairment, Speech Impairments.

Emotional Disordres: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Extended Grief, Anxiety attacks and Phobias.

Others:?Cardiovascular disabilities

The Therapeutic Horseback Riding allows participants to build social skills and self- confidence through interaction with the horse, other riders, and the teachers in the farm. The Riders enjoys the benefits of community integration while physically gaining strength, confidence, and communication abilities. The key words are probably ?the psychological energy that they gain?.?

It is important to remember that horseback riding may pose a hazard for patients suffering from vertigo or dizziness for as long as they are in the active phase of their disease. Recovering patients, on the other hand, may benefit from horseback riding by regaining and increasing the confidence in their balance and stance following the trauma and fear of falling.

This article is not offering the Pet Assisted Therapy as the only means of managing Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness and Meniere?s Disease. It is important to do every effort to find a curative medical treatment.?

The Pet Assisted Therapy should be considered as a complementary therapy, based on the wishes of the sufferer and his intuition regarding this approach. Prolonged symptoms May have behavioral effect after the disappearance of the basic medical condition, and the sufferer of Tinnitus, Vertigo, Dizziness and Meniere?s Disease should undergo Rehabilitation in addition to any other treatment.??

I would be happy to receive responses of sufferers who tried to imagine this kind of therapy for themselves or have a real experience with pets.

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Incoming search terms:

Tags: Apply, Assisted, Disease, Dizziness, Meniere's, Possible, Sake, Sufferers, Therapy, Tinnitus, Vertigo ?

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The Diverse Forms Of Coffee Plus Approaches In Which They Are ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]July 20, 2011 | Author: michellebarnesy1 | Posted in Food and Drink. For many people worldwide, coffee is definitely an absolute must for assisting them get through the day. From rising up each morning to getting through an afternoon ...

Source: http://articlerealty.com/the-diverse-forms-of-coffee-plus-approaches-in-which-they-are-manufactured/

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European debt fears hit markets after stress tests (AP)

LONDON ? Worries that Europe's debt crisis will spread to Italy and Spain spooked investors Monday after stress tests into the continent's banks failed to ease tensions ahead of an emergency meeting of EU leaders.

In afternoon trading, most of Europe's main stock markets were sharply lower, with bank shares hit particularly hard, while the euro fell 0.6 percent to $1.4041.

In a sign that contagion fears have not been allayed by last week's European bank stress test results, yields on Italian and Spanish bonds ratcheted up, in contrast to most other large economies.

The rate on ten-year Italian bonds spiked up 0.25 percentage point to 5.92 percent, having earlier jumped above 6 percent, even though the Parliament backed an austerity package designed to get the public finances back on an even keel. The Spanish rate rose 0.15 percentage point to 6.23 percent.

Last Friday's stress tests have so far been met with a degree of skepticism by investors, partly because they did not take into account any sovereign default.

The banks were required to reveal their exposure to shaky government debt but analysts said it would have been better if the European Banking Authority had simulated the impact of a default in its test scenarios to better judge the system's strength.

"On the face of it, the tests highlight that the European banking sector is in better health than expected, although crucially investor concern will remain over the credibility of the tests given that the tests did not include an assessment of the impact of sovereign defaults," said Lee Hardman, an analyst at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.

Only eight of the 90 banks tested failed and were pushed to raise euro2.5 billion ($3.5 billion); five were from Spain, two were Greek and one was Austrian. Sixteen barely passed, however, and may face pressure to strengthen their finances by raising new capital ? the idea behind the exercise.

Shoring up the banks is a key part of Europe's battle against its government debt crisis, since a default by Greece or another ailing country could inflict losses on banks, requiring government bailouts and choking off credit to the economy.

Greece is expected to be deemed in default by credit rating agencies if banks take losses in a second bailout for the country. On Thursday, EU leaders will hold an emergency meeting to discuss the terms of such a deal.

The stress tests required banks to show they could maintain a financial buffer in a downturn: at least 5 percent of loans, bonds and other investments. Regulators required disclosure of a large amount of data on banks' finances to allow analysts to make their own conclusions on the sector's health ? since the EU couldn't bring itself to consider the possibility of default.

Royal Bank of Scotland analysts, for instance, said that if all the banks had to account for the fallen value of distressed bonds now on their books, 57 of the 90 tested would have to raise euro91 billion ($130 billion) in capital to meet a tougher 7 percent capital buffer.

Still, German and Spanish officials said they did not see the need for their banks to raise more capital and questioned the assumptions of the tests. Germany had two banks that barely passed and Spain had seven.

Amid the uncertainty, bank shares across Europe took a hammering. Italy's Banco Popolare, which barely passed the test, was down 6.7 percent; France's Credit Agricole fell 3.6 percent, and Germany's Deutsche Bank dropped 3.4 percent. The retreat wasn't just isolated to countries that use the euro ? Britain's Barclays fell 3.7 percent.

The worry in the markets is that this week's meeting will fail to come up with concrete measures to deal with Greece amid growing signs of a split between the European Central Bank and the German government in particular.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will be at the summit, has been pressing for the involvement of the banks in the bailout.

But the ECB's president, Jean-Claude Trichet, insists the central bank would not accept defaulted Greek bonds as collateral, potentially cutting off funding for Greece's banks.

"If a country defaults, we will no longer be able to accept its defaulted government bonds as normal eligible collateral," he said in an interview with Financial Times Deutschland.

Trichet added that governments would then be responsible to provide their own backstop for the Greek financial system if the country is considered to be in default on its debts.

The ECB said Monday that it had made no effort last week to prop up bond markets through its securities purchase program, the 16th straight week it has left the measure idle.

___

McHugh contributed from Frankfurt, Germany.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110718/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_europe_financial_crisis

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Feds, states in dispute over court interpreters (AP)

HARTFORD, Conn. ? Annie Ling understood little of what was being said in a Georgia courtroom where she was put on trial, convicted by a jury and sentenced to 10 years in prison for abusing her two young children.

The Malaysia native speaks Mandarin but little English, and there was no interpreter for her during the 2008 proceedings in Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Just after she was sentenced, she thought she was going home and asked probation officials when she had to return to their office. She had no idea she was about to be hauled off to jail.

"She just basically was in the dark," said J. Scott Key, a lawyer who represented Ling in her successful appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled last November that she was entitled to a new trial because she had no interpreter. Charges against Ling are pending, but she has been freed on bail after serving nearly three years behind bars.

Cases like Ling's, which continue to play out across the country, have prompted the U.S. Justice Department to warn officials in all states that they're violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if they're not providing interpreters, free of charge, in all court-related proceedings and programs. But top state court officials are disputing the department's interpretation of civil rights laws, saying it goes too far and would require a large expansion of interpreter services that cash-strapped states can't afford.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, says the agency is "simply clarifying obligations that have existed for over 45 years."

"We have investigations in a number of states based on complaints we have received based on the ... inability to access the court systems," Perez told The Associated Press. "If you can't communicate in the courtroom, you don't have access to justice."

In late June, the Justice Department reached an agreement with Colorado officials to resolve complaints that state courts were not providing interpreters in all cases, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on national origin. Colorado's chief justice has issued a directive requiring free interpreters for all court proceedings. Justice officials reached a similar agreement with Maine's Judicial Branch in 2008, and they are now investigating a complaint filed in May by immigrant advocates over North Carolina's lack of interpreter services in civil cases.

In March, an appellate court in Florida threw out a 22-year prison sentence imposed in a probation violation case against a Hispanic man convicted of attempted sexual assault and kidnapping and ordered the judge to re-sentence the defendant. The court ruled that the judge improperly went ahead with the sentencing hearing without an interpreter over the objections of the defense lawyer.

In January, a Texas appellate court in a split decision upheld a 20-day jail sentence for a Korean woman convicted of prostitution, despite her not having an interpreter for one of the days of her trial.

And in November, officials of New York City's transit court decided to offer interpreters over the telephone, after civil liberties advocates alleged the court was violating defendants' due process rights by not providing translators.

Perez launched an effort last year to get states to fully comply with interpreter requirements. In a letter to top judiciary officials in all the states, he wrote that civil rights laws require state courts receiving federal funding to provide interpreters free of charge to people with limited English proficiency regardless of their ability to pay. He also told state officials that they have to provide free interpreters not only in criminal cases, but in all judicial proceedings and programs, ranging from civil cases to probation and parole offices to anger management classes.

State judicial officials don't dispute the right of people to interpreters in the courtroom, but they take issue with claims that states must provide free interpreters in civil court cases and non-courtroom settings. They also say the Justice Department's official 2002 guidance on adhering to Title VI requires states only to "take reasonable steps" to ensure meaningful access to judicial programs by people with limited English proficiency.

The leaders of two groups that represent top state judiciary officials nationwide ? the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators ? expressed their concerns to Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month about Perez's letter. They also told the president of the American Bar Association that they oppose the ABA's proposed court interpreter standards, which mirror the Justice Department requirements and will be presented for approval at the group's annual meeting in Toronto next month.

The leaders of the groups, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson and Lilia Judson, executive director of Indiana's Division of State Court Administration, say eliminating language barriers has been a high priority for state judicial officials for years. They say states have been making good progress in improving access to the courts, including creating credentialing programs for interpreters.

"At the very time the standards propose absolute access to interpreters ? both in and out of court ? state courts are furloughing staff, shuttering courthouses, and sometimes requiring litigants to bring their own paper for copies, Jefferson and Judson wrote to ABA president Stephen Zack. "Absent significant increases in resources, the state courts cannot meet the more far-reaching standards without cannibalizing other critical programs in such areas as domestic violence, juvenile justice, information technology, and problem-solving courts, to name a few."

Zack said Jefferson's and Judson's concerns are being considered and he expects changes to be made to the proposed standards.

Tim Schultz, a spokesman for U.S. English Inc., which supports laws that make English the official language, said people with limited English proficiency should have interpreters in court, but the government shouldn't have to pay for interpreters in all cases. He said the U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee people the right to receive government services in their native language.

"We think the Justice Department is trying to essentially bully states into doing what they want and it's certainly not legally required," Schultz said.

The Justice Department has the authority to withhold federal funds from courts if they don't comply with the Civil Rights Act, but officials say that's a last resort that hasn't yet been used. Perez says budget problems don't exempt states from civil rights requirements. Federal courts follow a different law on court interpreters.

In a 2009 study of 35 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found that 80 percent didn't guarantee free interpreter services, nearly half didn't require interpreters in all civil cases and just over a third didn't require the use of trained, credentialed interpreters.

"Across the country, people are stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare: they must go to court to protect their children, homes or safety, but they can neither communicate nor understand what is happening," wrote the study's author, Laura Abel, deputy director of the Brennan Center's justice program.

Abel told the AP that courts have been placed in a difficult position because legislatures have been cutting their budgets and there's no money to expand interpreter programs.

"But I would ask, what were you doing in the years before the budget constraints?" Abel said. "It's really chilling when you see courts which are charged with enforcing civil rights statutes trying to find loopholes to get out of their obligations."

Zack, the ABA's first Hispanic president, said underfunding is the major issue facing judicial branches today.

"The legislatures need to understand that judicial is not another road or library. It's fundamental to our liberty," he said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110717/ap_on_re_us/us_court_interpreters

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Behind foreclosure corner-cutting, troves of missing documents (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Why have sketchy mortgage procedures been so difficult to root out? Some lawyers blame misguided efforts to cut costs. Most foreclosures are uncontested, they note. And so servicers save money by avoiding costly searches for missing original documents or hiring additional staff to deal with the surge in foreclosures.

There are signs, however, that servicers resort to doubtful documents because they have no choice if they are determined to foreclose: To a great extent, originals simply don't exist.

It's one of the overlooked legacies of the housing boom.

In the rush to make new home loans and sell them off as fast as possible to investors on Wall Street, the original lenders --big banks as well as now defunct makers of subprime loans --destroyed original documents, or never turned them over as required to the ownership pools that scooped them up. From 2004 through the end of the housing boom in 2006, more than half of all new mortgages were securitized and sold to such pools, known as mortgage-securitization trusts, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

So, banks and intermediaries in many cases never turned over the two essential documents underpinning a home loan -- promissory notes and mortgages -- that would convey ownership to the investor trusts. That means many pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds that invested in the trusts never got formal title to mortgages they had paid for.

Sheila Bair, who recently stepped down as Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman, in Congressional testimony has called for a wide-ranging audit of the problem. But other regulators so far haven't backed the idea, possibly fearing that if the extent of the problem became known the housing market might worsen.

One example: Public records in foreclosure cases indicate that New Century Mortgage, the nation's second-largest subprime lender until it collapsed in 2007, almost never endorsed promissory notes or assigned mortgages to trusts that bought its mortgages.

A Reuters sampling of 50 foreclosure cases filed in Duval County, Florida, involving New Century mortgages found that none of the promissory notes filed in the cases had any endorsements at all on them. Records show that similar large-scale lapses occurred with other big lenders.

The result is that trusts may be out many billions of dollars, says Matthew Weidner, a lawyer who specializes in mortgage litigation. If proper procedures are followed now, foreclosures could slow to a trickle. And a cloud would hang over title to millions of homes, potentially further depressing the housing market.

Sheila Bair, who recently stepped down as Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman, in Congressional testimony has called for a wide-ranging audit of the problem. But other regulators so far haven't backed the idea, possibly fearing the consequences if the extent of the problem became known.

(Editing by Michael Williams)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110719/us_nm/us_foreclosures_banks_missing

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Feds get a dose of kitchen-table economics (AP)

WASHINGTON ? The debt crisis has brought the government to the "kitchen table" to do something that hard-pressed families do routinely, which is tear their hair out over how to pay the bills.

Pawn the family jewelry? Emptying gold reserves at Fort Knox and other repositories could raise a very handy $400 billion.

Sell the property that has been in the family for generations? Yosemite National Park would fetch a pretty penny.

At least so far, such last-gasp ideas are not in serious play at Washington's kitchen table. But as the Aug. 2 deadline approaches for raising the country's borrowing limit, you can bet someone in the government is thinking about them. Economists are.

"The consequences of America defaulting on its debt are so unthinkable, catastrophic and costly that we should consider anything," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at the Martin Smith College of Business at California State University. "Sell gold, sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, do ANYTHING to avoid a default."

In short, the nation is like a family that's overextended and close to wits' end.

To carry on without going deeper in debt, this family would have to cut its monthly bills by 70 percent or get a huge pay increase at work, enough to raise their income by nearly two-thirds. Now.

Then they could scrape by without borrowing more, at least for a little while.

So calculates the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in describing the only way the government could move ahead without taking on more debt. An end to discretionary spending, a 70 percent cut in mandatory spending or an enormous boost in tax revenue would suffice, but only for this year, it says. Then it gets even worse.

Nothing like that will happen.

The government is almost certain to raise its debt limit and carry on borrowing something like 40 cents out of every dollar it spends.

The question is whether it will do so in time to avoid late interest payments and economic turmoil, and what size spending cuts, tax increases or both will become part of the deal.

Nothing is stopping Congress from voting to raise the debt limit today. The holdup is over how to reduce future budget shortfalls, which both parties say must be done.

Republicans want a huge cut in government spending. President Barack Obama wants smaller, but still substantial cuts, plus more money coming in from taxes, which Republicans oppose.

To get around this, an idea has picked up steam to let the head of the household increase the debt limit on his own, under certain conditions, and take the heat off the fractious family to agree on all the spending cuts and revenue increases now.

The government bought some time in the middle of May, when it stopped making payments to federal employee retirement funds, the equivalent of halting contributions to your 401(k). The government will make up the lost retirement investments later, plus interest, keeping the funds whole.

But there are no such bookkeeping maneuvers left, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says, "no way to give Congress more time."

Some big payments are coming due, including $23 billion for Social Security checks on Aug. 2, $87 billion the next day to redeem maturing Treasury securities and more than $30 billion in interest payments on existing Treasury securities on Aug. 15.

Those payouts are in addition to roughly $5 billion to $10 billion the government pays daily to defense contractors, Medicare providers, federal employees and others, all part of the business of running the government.

With red flags flying from credit-rating agencies, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the corporate sector, the pressure is intensifying for Washington to break the impasse not just by the deadline but before. That would discourage investors from fleeing from the market in a predefault panic and preserve the nation's top-of-the-line credit rating.

In 1979, when Congress dragged its feet in raising the debt limit and the government ran into technical glitches processing its debt, the U.S. was late making interest payments on about $120 million of bills.

It amounted to a piddling sum compared with what may be coming, causing only a brief delay and no concern by creditors that they wouldn't get paid. Yet the mini-default permanently raised interest rates by more than half a percentage point, says the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

That's like making your mortgage payments on time for years, seeing one monthly check get hung up in the mail for a few days, and getting hit in response with a higher rate for the life of the loan.

Some Republicans have argued that the government can do the same thing a family does when faced with more bills than it can pay in a single month. It can set priorities and make only the critical payments, such as the utility bills to keep the lights on and the water flowing, and let other payments wait. In this scenario, interest payments are the most critical.

Obama disputes that approach.

"A family, if they get over-extended and their credit card is too high, they don't just stop paying their bills," he said. "What they do is, they say, how do we start cutting our monthly costs?

"We don't stop sending our kids to college, we don't stop fixing the boiler or the roof that's leaking. We do things in a sensible, responsible way."

Still, setting aside some bills has not been ruled out.

Obama held out the possibility that the government won't be able to send retirees their Social Security checks in time. Republicans called such remarks a scare tactic to get them to cave to his proposals.

But should those checks get delayed, it's a sure bet both parties would be scared.

Messing with Social Security is not just like a family disrespecting its elders. It's like stiffing your bookie. In political terms, it can get you broken legs.

In some important ways, the federal budget is not recognizable to a real family. It's from another planet, esoteric, full of accounting tricks, funny money, and obligations that citizens don't have.

Families don't have the option of just voting to raise their credit card limit, for one thing.

But that, in essence, is what the government needs to do, and fast, to avoid defaulting on its debt payments, sending markets into a probable tailspin and making all sorts of dire predictions come true.

Even in Washington, math is math.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110717/ap_on_bi_ge/us_debt_showdown_kitchen_table

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