Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
If you’re LGBTQ — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or nonbinary, or queer — your gender and sexuality can affect your mental health and wellness. There are external things that might affect you more than a straight, cisgender person (someone whose biological sex aligns with their gender identity).
Coming out is when you decide to tell people about your gender or sexual orientation. We live in what you might hear called a heteronormative society, which means people usually assume you identify with the sex you were assigned at birth (cisgender) and are attracted to members of the opposite sex (heterosexual). But that isn’t always the case, and it’s just one of many reasons LGBTQ people decide to come out. Here are some things to consider about coming out, along with tips for how to do it.
HIV status discrimination is when people living with HIV and AIDS face negative attitudes, abuse, and discrimination.
There was a lot of fear and anxiety when HIV became an epidemic in the 1980s. During that time, doctors didn’t know much about how HIV was spread, so people were scared of getting it. That same fear continues, even today.
No matter where you are on the gender spectrum, you might choose to use birth control if there’s a chance you could get pregnant and you don’t want to.
Not all people who are transgender, nonbinary, or gender expansive choose to get gender-affirming care. But some people do take hormone therapy as part of their medical care to help align their sex characteristics with their gender identity. If you do, keep in mind that gender-affirming hormone therapy isn’t made for birth control, so you shouldn’t rely on it for that purpose.
Maurie Lung, PhD, was in second grade when she realized what she wanted to do when she grew up.
“When I went away to summer camp, my little Strawberry Shortcake diary said, ‘When I grow up, I want to help people in the outdoors,’” Lung says. And that’s exactly what she does today.
Lung oversees the nature-based and adventure-based counseling programs at Prescott College and is also a licensed therapist and counselor who does nature-based and adventure-based counseling for individuals, couples, and families.
Although knee pain is common as you age, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. There are ways to prevent it as you age. And if you already have knee pain, there are ways to manage and treat it.
Having hip pain as you age is more common than you think. About 50% of older adults say they have hip or knee pain. Luckily, there are things you can do to feel better.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women living in the United States, second only to skin cancers.
If you were recently diagnosed with breast cancer, or you know someone who was, books can be a great way to answer your questions and learn more about breast cancer. Here are some great breast cancer reads, as recommended by doctors and people living with breast cancer.
Reading blogs created by others living with it (or blogging yourself) can be a good way to connect to other people in the breast cancer community. Here are six of the best breast cancer blogs, recommended by doctors and people living with breast cancer.
If you have lung cancer, it’s common to notice less of an appetite or to lose weight without trying. The disease and its treatment can have an effect on your appetite and how your body breaks down food and uses nutrients.
Some people who have lung cancer take dietary supplements and vitamins to make sure their bodies get all the nutrients they need.
Certain supplements are safe and even helpful when you have lung cancer. Others may interfere with your treatment. Always ask your doctor before taking a dietary supplement or vitamin.
The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, recently surveyed about 40,000 LGBTQ people across the United States who were ages 13-24 to gain insight regarding mental health, among other topics.
A key finding was that 40 percent of the respondents said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year. While troubling, those statistics weren’t a shock to public health experts.
“I think we know that LGBTQ youth are a vulnerable population and I think we could do so much more to support them,” says Jessica Bernacki, a licensed clinical psychologist at the UCLA Gender Health Program, who was not a part of the Trevor Project research team.
“Having our faces covered has caused distress and frustration for me,” says Greg Reese, a Deaf high school English teacher born and raised in Atlanta. “There is an option of a clear see-through mask, but it is not easily available in sufficient numbers.”
The difficulty of not being able to see faces clearly also affects communication between deaf individuals and interpreters.
Gicell Rodriguez, the owner and lead planner of Luna Rosa Weddings & Events in Atlanta, said the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly changed the way she handles weddings. That means following protocols such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
Rodriguez recalls the impact on her business early in the pandemic, when the lockdown put everything on hold. For “a couple of months,” she said, “everyone in the wedding industry was very nervous about when that next inquiry was going to come. It was at a standstill.”
Many students choose to take it easy during their summer break. But instead of spending the remaining days of her summer vacation sleeping in, Sombal Bari is on the phone for hours at a time to stop the spread of COVID-19 through her job as a contact tracer.
Bari, from the southwest Georgia town of Cairo, is a student in the master’s program for social work and public health at the University of Georgia. She has a passion for promoting health in rural areas, so when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the UGA College of Public Health sent out an email looking for available students, she answered the call.
Billy Hendrix, a 30-year veteran of the funeral industry, thought he had seen it all. But the last few months have changed his mind. He says he has experienced ups and downs in the business over the years. But he said he’s never seen anything affect what he does quite like COVID-19, which has put some funerals on hold and limited which services can be offered.
“Sometimes we feel defeated — that we’re not giving our family everything that we should and we’re restricted to some degree,” Hendrix said.
Peter Dale, a restaurateur and chef born and raised in Athens, had never seen anything like it. On Monday, the streets of Athens were empty. The University of Georgia’s campus was silent. Restaurants like his, usually busy with the lunch rush, sat quiet and mostly deserted.
“That kind of made it a little scarier,” Dale said. “Because we knew that something was coming.”
Before traveling to China in late January, Holly Bik and her husband watched countless news reports and read as much as they could about the novel coronavirus, which had been detected in the country a few weeks earlier. After weighing the odds, the couple went ahead with their travel plans. Things would be fine, they figured. They weren’t going to the heart of the outbreak.
“It wasn’t until we actually had gotten to China that everything blew up in the media, and . . . the scale of the problem really became apparent,” recalled Bik.
Public employees have the right to speak to the press without going through the boss, but workplace gag orders continue to violate their freedom of speech, says a report from The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, a nonprofit educational center.
The findings could have particular implications for health care journalists, the center’s director says.
“It’s not legal for a public agency to tell its employees they are forbidden from speaking to the media,” said Frank LoMonte, Brechner Center director and a journalism professor at the University of Florida. “And if you encounter a policy like that, you should know that the agency is breaking the law.”
University of Georgia researchers are receiving millions of federal dollars to help create a “universal” flu vaccine. But what does that term mean? And will a breakthrough vaccine persuade more Americans to get flu shots?
Right now, fewer than 40 percent of adults get a flu shot. And that’s bad.
When Precious Jones was a girl visiting her grandmother in Trenton, New Jersey, she was responsible for tasks like watering the garden or drying out the herbs. Her grandmother was a midwife, but she also cared and tended for her garden.
Little did Jones know the wisdom of her grandmother would fuel her entrepreneurial spirit and help Jones start her own company, MEplusTEA.
