Author and breast cancer survivor Barbara Delinsky has just released an updated edition of her book UPLIFT: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors and like her previous editions, this one delivers inspiring real-life stories from real-life survivors -- like Deb Haney, an administrative assistant diagnosed in 1996 at age 48, who reveals her secret to surviving breast cancer in the workplace.

"My boss at the time was my brother. He suggested I go for radiation treatment in the morning, work a few hours, then go home and rest in the afternoons. That is what I did, because even though I looked great, I was unbelievably tired. When illness comes, we need to listen to our bodies and give them the time to rest and recover. I hadn't anticipated it, but those afternoon hours became a truly peaceful, nurturing time to read and rest and enjoy quiet time."

Delinsky offers a chapter in her book called A Workplace Manual -- it's a place where survivors like Haney share strategies that helped them maintain the crucial balance between cancer and work.

Delinsky writes, "What works for one woman may not work for another. What works in one job may not work in another. The thing is, you need to take a step back, think about yourself and your situation, then speak up about what may work for you. In every situation, you have choices, and the choices are all good. What pleases one woman may not please another."

And so the women featured in UPLIFT share their individual choices. And their choices become options for the millions of women surviving a disease that throws everything off balance.

Rosamary Amiet, a program manager diagnosed in 2000 at age 48, shares, "I juggled cancer and work by just giving up some things, like housework. I discovered that the house could go for weeks without being vacuumed or dusted -- and not only did the sky not fall, it didn't even crack!"

UPLIFT is not all about the workplace. It's also about chemotherapy and losing hair and losing breasts. It's about family and humor and men. It's about religion and exercise and diagnosis. It's about help. It's about hope. It's about sisterhood -- plain and simple.

For fitness, the practice of yoga promotes balance, flexibility and strength. America loves yoga, according to a survey conducted by the Yoga Journal. The top four reasons given for the interest in yoga were: flexibility, stress reduction, strength, fitness and conditioning. As yoga grows in popularity, it is also becoming Americanized, and there are a number of hybrid yoga practices springing up like: Acu-yoga, Yogilates, Disco Yoga, Hip-Hop Yoga, Punk Rock Yoga, Aqua Yoga, Doga (with your dog), Yoganetics, Soul FlowYoga, Freestyle Vinyasa Flow, Sonic Yoga, Yogic Arts (yoga combined with martial arts) and Nude Yoga -- which is a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who you are asking.

Of the survey participants who were asked , these were the top four good/bad statements made to the increasing popularity of yoga in this country:

• "Americans need to recognize that practicing yoga doesn't conflict with mainstream religious values."
• "The commercialization of yoga is a good thing. It attracts many more people to the practice who otherwise wouldn't know about it."
• "Innovation is good for yoga. The many different styles that are evolving make the practice accessible to everyone."
• "Yoga in America is becoming too commercialized."
  

Is yoga the current fitness fad? Maybe. Will it fade in popularity? I suspect it will for those who flitter from one new trend to the next new trend. But, for example, there have been years of research into the potential benefit of yoga in improving the quality of life for cancer patients and survivors, and the National Cancer Institute has recently awarded M. D. Anderson a $2.4 million dollar grant to study the benefits of Tibetan yoga for cancer patients and survivors.

According to M. D. Anderson researchers, cancer and its treatment are associated with considerable distress, impaired quality of life, poor mental health and reduced physical function. For thousands of years, Tibetans have been practicing a form of yoga that might help reduce treatment-related side effects that accumulate over time for cancer patients. As research continues, yoga may become an accepted alternative and complementary therapy incorporated into mainstream medical practice for the treatment of disease and improving health.

Realistically, I am not certain that some of the trendy hybrid forms of yoga will endure over time, but the yoga that has been around for thousands of years is here to stay.

Out of Las Vegas, urban fashion designer and Cock Blocker Clothing founder Mark James has started a company with major attitude. As the company states on its website, it offers an artistic sense of humor to an otherwise vicious and often times malicious environment of everyday life issues of politics, art, sex, relationships, love, race, religion, business, and war.

Cock Blocker Clothing is popular with celebrities, who have autographed many Cock Blocker Clothing apparel items for an auction to benefit the 3-Day walk for breast cancer charity.

Supporting breast cancer research is personal for James, whose mother is currently battling her own diagnosis of breast cancer. He wants to help other women who are going through the same struggles as his mother in contributing to something that can make a positive difference.

Cock Blocker Clothing might not be for everyone. If you enjoy a wicked sense of humor and off-the-grid attitude, then you might appreciate the business passion of a man who once worked -- or as he says slaved -- for seven years in the corporate world of entertainment in Los Angeles for Warner Bros. & Fox Studios and then escaped.

If you would like to be a sponsor, make donations or take part in auction bidding, check in at the Cock Blocker Clothing website where auction, fundraiser time, date, and venue information will be posted June 25. You can view photos of the autographed-by-celebrities Cock Blocker Clothing items at that time.

Lord of the Rings Oscar award-winning filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have donated over $300,000 dollars to the University of California for human embryonic stem cell research.

Jackson is quoted as saying, "We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific."

The Bill and Joan Jackson Scholars Fund, in honor of Jackson's parents, will be established through the university to award two scholarships to students specializing in stem cell research. Because the US government restricts research funding for the use of stem cells from human embryos -- which some religious groups have objected to as morally equivalent to abortion -- and others support as the path to cures for many diseases including cancer -- human embryonic stem cell research in this country requires private funding.

"Stem cell therapy has the potential to treat a multitude of diseases and illnesses, which up until now have been labelled incurable. It has the capacity to exponentially improve the quality of life for those who currently suffer from spinal cord injury, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and many other debilitating medical conditions, " stated Jackson.

How do you measure the ethereal? In an earlier post, I quoted Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, who I believe summed it up best when he stated, "The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion."

It doesn't seem to keep those intent on attempting to measuring the immeasurable and attempting to prove in physical world scientific terms that spirituality can play a powerful role in health and healing. Of course it can. Spirituality is a path to profound healing for those who are spiritual in nature. But it does not exclude healing from those who do not follow a spiritual path. The truest power rests in the power of belief itself on an internal landscape of the mind and body.

The John Templeton Foundation announced it is funding a new study at Michigan State University exploring the role spirituality plays in the recovery from breast cancer. I think that it will not matter the results of the study -- if it is positive it will reaffirm what the spiritual believe to be true and challenged by those who do not put much weight in the spiritual dimension of being. If it does not reveal a significant link between spirituality and healing, then the reverse dismissive rejection of the findings will be made.

Do I believe in the power of spirituality to heal? Yes. Do I believe it gives me an advantage to healing over those who do not share my beliefs? No. There are many paths leading to the same destination. The wisdom would be in acknowledging all paths as real and powerful. If we did that, we wouldn't need a study sure to bring nothing but more controversial debate with little possibility in the blending of hearts and minds between spirituality and science. 

It is official. The first cervical cancer vaccine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, FDA. Merck's Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine is the first of several cancer vaccines expected to win approval this year. Gardasil, which targets human papillomavirus, HPV, will be given in three doses over six months. HPV is known to be responsible for the majority of cervical cancer cases.

The cervical cancer vaccine is not without its warnings though. In an earlier post, cervical cancer vaccine protects and promotes cancer, we noted a caution that research has shown the vaccine can actually raise the risk of cervical cancer if the woman is already infected with HPV at the time she receives the cervical cancer vaccine. So, it is not for every woman.

We also noted in an earlier post, cancer vaccine facing Christian Right opposition, there is strong objection to the cervical cancer vaccine based on religious convictions regarding sex and teenage girls. According to experts, girls in their early teens are the most likely to benefit from the cervical cancer vaccine. 

I did not know -- until I was sitting in the Cancer Center receiving chemo for breast cancer last year -- that author Barbara Delinsky is a breast cancer survivor.  My sister handed me a book off the shelf in this infusion center filled to the brim with cancer patients, all seated neatly in a row on pink leather recliners.  I started flipping through the book -- called Uplift: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors -- when I realized it was written by a best-selling author I had read before.  Her novels have caught my attention on several occasions and have been some of the books I have had a hard time putting down.  This book was no different.

Uplift is a book full of anecdotes and advice and wisdom shared by every-day breast cancer survivors -- and the family, friends, and men in their lives too. Topics include chemo and hair, the workplace, humor, exercise, and religion, among others. And without medical jargon or statistical reports, readers learn from those who have been there -- and want to make the road easier for those who follow.

I had to put Uplift back on the shelf once my infusion was complete but days later, I received a package in the mail from a former co-worker and friend.  Inside the package was my very own personal Uplift.  I have read it and reread it.  I have loaned it out and recommended it and quoted from it.  It is truly uplifting. 

From the beginning, I was a fan of the music of Jamaican singer, guitarist, songwriter and activist Bob Marley. Once while playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with a group of brainiacs -- that I was sure I was going to lose -- I won because of Bob Marley. So, it was a sad day when the news came that Marley, only 36, had died of cancer. In 1977, Marley found a wound on his right toe. He thought it was a sports injury, but it was melanoma under the toe nail. He refused to have his toe amputated because of his Rastafarian beliefs that the body must be whole. In time, the cancer spread to Marley's brain, lungs, liver, and stomach. Marley finally did seek medical help, and went to Munich in order to receive treatment from cancer specialist Josef Issels, but the cancer had already progressed to the terminal stage. Marley lost his life to cancer in May 1981. He died without a will.

Recently, and over twenty years after Marley's death, Marley's bass player Aston Barrett, attempted to sue Island Records and the Marley family for 60 million pounds stating he did not receive royalties and songwriting credits. Last Monday the suit was dismissed. But not before Barrett had a chance to malign the late Marley as nothing more than someone good at playing sports -- not the music that gained him worldwide popularity.

"We always felt this would be the outcome, and it was hard to listen to Aston Barrett reduce his friend Bob to someone who was more interested in playing football than making music," the family said in a statement. Now, Barrett will be liable for court costs and forced to sell two properties in Jamaica as a result of the ruling. Greed will get you, one way or the other. I was happy to hear the ruling went the way it did.

Last week, I posted on the power behind the power of prayer regarding a study basically suggesting that prayer does not help people heal, and to make matters worse, prayer seems to inadvertently act with evil-eye power, making those prayed for suffer more difficult recovery than their counterparts who were not prayed for at all. But if prayer can have a negative affect on the health of someone prayed for, then it must have the power to heal too. Yes? Yes. As Nietzsche once pointed out, good and bad cannot, and do not, travel separately, as each is merely a side to a two-sided coin. So if the study is suggesting prayer does not have any power to heal, it cancels out its conclusions by suggesting that prayer does have the power to harm. All this study provides is a reference for those who believe there is nothing beyond life but what we experience in a skin-and-bones existence, much the same as a religious text is used by those to support their take on ultimate truth. You would think we could learn to agree to disagree, because, dare I suggest, each of us is partly right and none of us owns the exclusive rights to reality and truth. But then again, what good is that perspective when it comes to pissing contests or the impassioned discourse that fuels the religious and scientifically political punditry.

In a Slate article, The Deity in the Data by William Saletan, the author asserts that the researchers of the study, many media outlets and clerics are shrugging off the study findings because the findings did not go the way most expected, or wanted. The study "cannot address a large number of religious questions, such as whether God exists, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work in the same way as prayers from other groups." To that, Saletan says bull. He presents some interesting, and entertaining, perspectives of his own. I do not think anyone is shrugging. As I see it, the power of prayer was not the real focus of the study, but whether or not God can be proven as real. Quite a task, and an unneeded one. Those who believe in the power of their God, believe in the power of their prayers. For those who do not believe, there is nothing to prove, is there? It is my guess that the researchers might not have received the same level of funding by stating the obvious hypothesis.