Skip to main content

Posts

Featured

Spring Forever

  By the Aras river just off the border with Armenia is a tiny Turkish village not many heard of and even fewer cared about until not that long ago.   Ayazkesti was somewhere nobody went to unless they had to, except for the casual smugglers stopping for supplies or seeking refuge from the sudden blizzards that ravage the unworldly terrain in winters. That is, nonetheless, where Bahar is from and where her greatest benefactor in life, Ayhan, lies buried today. From there, she feels, he watches over all that comes to pass as she became a pediatric surgeon and chooses to lead a life worthy of the honor following his example ever since.   No wonder, then, that Bahar has an immaculate record as a physician for she couldn't be expected of anything less with the textbook care she has provided to her patients. During her practice for over half a century, she has never failed anyone who relied on her and has always known how to maintain people's trust unscathed. The trick, she says whe
Recent posts

Happiest People on Earth: Can You Be One of Them?

  The link between happiness and health is indisputable. It is so much so that the two can hardly exist without one another. Ask Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama and the highest spiritual Tibetan leader, and he is famous to have said that "happiness is the highest form of health."  I agree.  Staying healthy without being happy is next to impossible and a low life satisfaction is almost certain to derail one's health sooner or later. All that promote happiness, or subjective well-being, then, are likely to improve one's health outcomes, too.  But, life has inescapable ups and downs and we all experience loss, failure and disappointment -- some more than others -- as our journeys progress and we age. So the question is how do we stay happy regardless? Here, I will propose a certain state of mind that allows people to attest to a solid, thick body of contentment with their lives no matter what: Core happiness. It is an uninterrupted experience of perfection in one&#

Mental Health 101: How to End School Anxiety

  One way or another, most of us spend a good deal of our lives at school, dealing with it in multiple dimensions. It impacts our relationships with our friends and families, not to mention our-very-selves. If not properly addressed, the fear of failure that often manifests itself around exam periods might turn into a constant state of anxiety and continue to haunt us day and night even beyond formal education years.  Knowing how to overcome it, therefore, has an enormous potential to improve how much we make out of our most valued treasure in this life -- our time. I suggest you spare the next couple of minutes and read on to start the change today. Prioritize Education and Learning, Not The School Itself Answer me one thing first: Why do you go to school? As small kids, we started doing so because our families or caretakers wanted us to. And because everyone did the same, we never questioned, at least not initially, why we became a student all of a sudden. Those were the years when w

Pandemic Denies Cancer Patients Life-Saving Treatments

When Adrian Rogers (46) was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in the summer of 2018, the term 'coronavirus' was literally unknown outside a small group of scientists and medical professionals directly dealing with it. Only two-and-a-half years later, however, it was to push Rogers and millions of other people to death worldwide; and not necessarily because they were infected with the incredibly dangerous pathogen.  Rogers was forced to miss a scheduled, potentially life-saving operation in Manchester in April 2020 because of the overburdened health system in the UK and sadly did not live to see the next spring. The planned surgery could not go ahead because Rogers' immune system was already compromised because of the multiple rounds of chemotherapy he had received as a cancer patient and the doctors considered it to be too risky to place him in an intensive care unit with coronavirus patients post-operation.    "I definitely feel we wouldn't be where we are now if

Turkey Coronavirus Cases More Than Double in Three Weeks

Turkey Country Risk Map: Orange (High Risk), Red (Extreme Risk). Source: Turkish Health Ministry. The number of reported Covid-19 cases in Turkey has grown more than two-fold after three weeks into a "controlled normalization period" kicked off to ease the economic toll the pandemic has taken on the country's economy. There were a total of 22,216 positive results out of 201,215 tests ran on March 22, the Turkish health ministry said Monday. That was up 8.75% just over the day before and a shocking 124% compared to March 1, the day the country allowed the re-opening of a slurry of businesses including cafes and restaurants for dining in 64 of all its 81 provinces. According to official figures, 117 people died of Covid-19 on March 22, up from 69 on March 1. The latest tally brought the number of fatalities the country reported due to the highly infectious disease since the start of the pandemic to 30,178.      

Five Ways to Escape Lockdown Depression

After more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, it is still not clear when we could go back to the normal as we know it. Mentally, most of us have already had the worst episode of our lives but there is no guarantee that our hard-fought struggle will be over soon.  The chances are there will always be some level of unnerving measures everywhere we go outside our homes in the foreseeable future, even though, at the best, we do not wake up to the news of thousands of more deaths every day anymore.  So, it is time we adopt certain lifestyle changes to make sure we outlive this tiny yet incredibly cunning and dangerous virus as a perfectly healthy human being, both in body and in spirit. Here are five easy-to-follow suggestions: Fight the disease, not the measures Granted, all of us are tired and we do not want to be afraid or constrained any longer. We just want to be our old selves again. The thing is the price we might have to pay for forcing our way into it is too high. Any prematur