Good News Day 40: Benefits of Massage – Not Just an Indulgence!

As you lie on the table under crisp, fresh sheets, hushed music draws you into the moment. The smell of sage fills the air and you hear the gentle sound of massage oil being warmed in your therapist’s hands. The pains of age, the throbbing from your overstressed muscles, the sheer need to be touched — all cry out for therapeutic hands to start their work. Once the session gets underway, the problems of the world fade into an oblivious 60 minutes of relief and all you can comprehend right now is not wanting it to end.

But what if that hour of massage did more for you than just take the pressures of the day away?

Read more here: Benefits of Massage || Massage Therapy Articles

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Good News Day 34: New Procedure Allows Kidney Transplants From Any Donor

Thousands of patients languish on organ donor waiting lists because their immune systems would reject any transplanted organ that is not a match–until now.

Source: New Procedure Allows Kidney Transplants From Any Donor

Good News Day 24: Cognitive Function is Improved by Regular Chocolate Intake

Chocolate. The magic word is chocolate. There are very few people in the world that don’t like arguably the king of all desserts, as besides the fact that it is delicious, it also offers a large variety of health benefits, as long as you consume it in moderation. A team of researchers from the University of Maine, the Luxembourg Institute of Health, and the University of South Australia performed a meta-analysis showing that cognitive function is improved by regular chocolate intake …

Read more here: http://www.capitalberg.com/cognitive-function-improved-by-chocolate/28375/

Good News Day 18: How Meditation Changes the Mind and Body

Illustration by Anna Parini

The benefits of mindfulness meditation, increasingly popular in recent years, are supposed to be many: reduced stress and risk for various diseases, improved well-being, a rewired brain. But the experimental bases to support these claims have been few. Supporters of the practice have relied on very small samples of unrepresentative subjects, like isolated Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating every day, or on studies that generally were not randomized and did not include placebo­ control groups.

This month, however, a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.

Read the rest here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/contemplation-therapy/