This Dec Issue 153 of PH Online has an appropriately seasonal theme – with the nights starting to close in and, as animals, we feel like hibernating to re-charge our batteries for the coming winter.
Much is included about the power of healing – Healing Power of Music, Theta Healing – Letting Go of Limiting Beliefs, colour therapy The Prescribed Walk in the Park. Even the expert columns Diagnosis in Chinese Medicine: The Art of 'Doing Nothing' and Daoist Tips for 21st Century Living: Simplify, Simplify also have a soft theme of yielding and going with the flow.
However, it is the topic introduced by Gina Pickersgill in The Ins and Outs of Emotional Eating which has provided me with the inspiration to discuss personal insights regarding how pervasive other people's perception of my own Body Size and Shape has been throughout my life.

These are exceedingly frustrating times for those of us, and that includes most PH readers, who yearn for an integrated approach to healthcare which embraces the best of all disciplines and modalities from the entire medicine repertoire.Despite the polarized information from both the conventional and alternative/complementary medicine camps which posits a conspiracy on the part of the pharmaceutical and orthodox medicine establishment to wipe out non-drug medicine, I still harbour the hope that the majority of conventional doctors who espouse these views are more likely the victims of their inadequate training in other approaches, and the somewhat fundamentalist guidelines published by the medical hierarchy which favour RCTs (randomized controlled trials) over case-based medicine and the general media which are not expertly schooled in scientific and research methodology.