| Furniture store to be redeveloped as 'healing center'
He might have helped transform the Warehouse District into one of the city's premier neighborhoods, but developer Pres Kabacoff himself lives in the Bywater neighborhood, that redoubt of artists and eccentrics whose charm is inseparable from its grit. Kabacoff is now embarking on a project closer to home, and it is not his typical moneymaker. He plans to buy the former Universal Furniture store on St. Claude Avenue and turn it into a "healing center" with a cooperative grocery store, an organic restaurant, yoga studios, gallery space and a street university where people can give classes on anything from second-line dancing to filling out tax returns. He believes the proposal, in tandem with the city's plans to restore the iconic St. Roch Market across the street, has the potential to ignite a revival along St.
More researchers embrace mind-body connection
Tagging along with winter come ailments that challenge most Western doctors: stress, back and joint pain, head colds, heart attacks, anxiety, depression, upset stomachs and insomnia.Is it time to try acupuncture, hypnosis, meditation, guided imagery and massage?
Surprisingly, even the most conservative mainstream research hospitals now answer "yes!"Twenty years ago, the mind-body connection was largely dismissed by U.S. doctors as a wacky concept in healing. Today it's a staple of integrative medicine, the discipline that blends complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, with conventional treatments and places more emphasis on treating the whole person.About 75 percent of medical schools have CAM courses in the curriculum, and the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine includes 39 academic health centers, including Mayo Clinic as well as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Duke and Yale universities.To help doctors catch up on the growing body of evidence-based research on CAM therapies, the University of Chicago's Tang Center for Herbal Medi-cine Research and the Mayo Clinic co-hosted the annual Conference on Complementary and Alternative Medicine."The encouraging thing is that CAM treatments require self-care," said Brent Bauer, director of the Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program at the Mayo Clinic.
Against the odds
It is April and suddenly spring has arrived. Anna, my wife, appears in my hospital room pushing a wheelchair. 'I'm going to take you out,' she announces. I look at her blankly. I have not set foot outside the building since being admitted in the bitter days of early January. This seems a rather rash idea. 'I thought we'd go and sit in the hospital garden,' she says, undeterred by my lack of enthusiasm. .
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