Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 14, 1995 TAG: 9511140051
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By dialing 1-800-SMILE (1-800-764-5333), you can ask about everything from loose teeth and tooth decay to dentures, bleaching, implants and cosmetic dentistry.
Several hundred of the state's dentists will be attending a meeting at the Marriott in Williamsburg on Saturday, and some of them will take turns staffing the hotline phones.
Mind-body connection
The mind and the body have valuable connections that people, including health care professionals, are not taking advantage of, medical student Judy Fulop told participants in a recent conference on innovative wellness programs.
Evidence exists that the body and mind each make the other sick or feel better, but there is a gap between the research that proves this and the application of the research, she said.
Fulop is a former wellness consultant for St. Joseph Health Center in Kansas City. She is now studying natureopathic medicine, which depends on natural substances and/or methods for the treatment of illness, in Portland, Ore. Her Roanoke appearance was sponsored by the Mental Health Association of Roanoke Valley.
Fulop said she became interested in the different healing methods, such as humor, biofeedback, meditation and imagery, as a ward secretary in the hospital when she had a chance to read patient charts and started noticing the relationship of the illnesses to events in their lives. Also she became aware of the compartmentalization of medicine, how different doctors deal with different areas of a patient's body but don't get together to discuss the whole patient.
By the time she left St. Joseph, the hospital was experimenting with imagery to improve patients' reactions and outcomes to certain surgeries.
Bowel surgery patients were told to think of their favorite food and how much better able they would be to enjoy that food after the surgery. The result was that patients in the experiment were able to leave the hospital an average of 1.6 days earlier than patients who didn't use imagery.
In literature distributed at the workshop, persons interesting in learning more about the mind-body relationship were invited to an open forum each Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at LifeWorks, which is upstairs at Grandin Galleria, 1402 Grandin Road in southwest Roanoke.
by CNB