Free Republic

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for. He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India. But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life. A co-worker found him hanging from the fan of his apartment in New Delhi. His family has struggled for years to understand what happened. "I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It...

An experimental cure for Type 1 diabetes has a nearly 80 percent success rate in curing diabetic mice. The results, to be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston, offer possible hope of curing a disease that affects 3 million Americans. "With just one injection of this gene therapy, the mice remain diabetes-free long term and have a return of normal insulin levels in the body," said Vijay Yechoor, MD, the principal investigator and an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Yechoor and his co-workers used their new gene therapy in a nonobese...

Between unresolved family conflicts, relationship struggles and his mixed-race identity, James Puckett had enough on his mind in college that he sought professional help. But after bouncing from one therapist to another, he still felt stuck. “They were all female, and they did give me some comfort,” said Mr. Puckett, 30, who works for a domestic-abuse program in Wisconsin. “But I was getting the same rhetoric about changing my behavior without any challenge to see the bigger picture of what was behind these very male coping reactions, like putting your hand through a wall.” He decided to seek out a...

Sometimes we all get stuck in a rut. Events around us seem to be ever-changing but we just can’t seem to motivate ourselves to change with them. We do the same things we have always done and we end up with the same results we always get and there just doesn’t seem to be a way break the routines with which we have saddled ourselves. If this is you, let us provide you with some ideas – gleaned from literally a fraction of an hour of research on the internet – tailored to your specific situation. Let us help you...

UK Conservative party leader David Cameron has been urged to condemn "breathtaking" comments about gay people by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. On Sunday, Helmer tweeted: "Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to 'turn' a consenting homosexual?" He was responding to an article at the weekend in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper about how a British psychotherapist who tried to "convert" a gay man to become heterosexual now faces being struck off. Lesley Pilkington, 60, a psychotherapist for 20 years, faces being stripped of her accreditation to the...

Today, I want to discuss stress. We live in a time and age where stress is common, rampant, and so intense that it has become a tremendous challenge sometimes to simply maintain composure. Stress is a draining mechanism that can easily take our focus off of the Lord and dwell on our own troubles. Now, to us Christians, there are three major types of stress we should examine....... Work-Related Stress: Back in June, a friend of mine and I went to a restaurant we both like. When the waitress came to our table, she had a “brain freeze” for a...

Attention, smartphone addicts: Now you can get treatment for that addiction through the very device that enslaves you. Josh Dzieza on psychology’s new technological frontier. Plenty of people joke about their addictions to their “CrackBerries,” and there’s likely more than a bit of truth to that. (Indeed, the new DSM, the mental health bible for psychologists, may include “Internet addiction” among its many pathologies.) But while smartphones can certainly enable compulsive behavior, surprisingly psychologists are increasingly seeing them as a tool with potential mental health benefits. Capitalizing on the ubiquity of the increasingly powerful mobile devices nearly everyone carries around...

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be...

I'm asking for prayer from my FRiends. Wednesday my wife Judy and I went to emergency because her left arm and leg were very, very weak. After tests it turns out she has ovarian or uterine cancer which has spread to 5 tumors in the brain and two on her lungs. One of the brain tumors is causing her left arm and leg to be almost completely paralyzed. She is checked into TMC Hospital and has already begun radiation treatment on the brain tumors. She will have two weeks of that. They will most likely also have surgery for...

"'Diversity' also includes those of us with more traditional anthropological viewpoints." On May 21-22, 2010, a conference entitled "Gender Identity and Freedom" was held in Brescia, Italy and attended by 168 people. The first seminar was entitled, "The Approach to Unwanted Homosexuality: Psychological Treatment Tools," and was aimed at psychologists, educators, and professionals, with 99 attendees. The second, "Gender Identity: The Condition and Causes of Homosexuality" was open to the members of the twelve associations that had organized the conference … As soon as news got out that a conference with Dr. Nicolosi would be held in Brescia, interest about...

He lost his puppy - and his voice. A 4-year-old mute boy who spoke for the first time after getting a dog for his birthday went silent again after the puppy was stolen. Liam Hainsworth, of West Yorkshire, England, is heartbroken over the loss of his best friend, a pug named Milie. "There's no words coming out but you just know he's screaming 'Where is Milie? Where is she?' inside," his worried mother, Aimee Hainsworth, 24, told London's Daily Mail. "Milie really was his best friend. They would play together happily for hours. None of his toys has ever held...

When I first read about Nicolai Sennels’ work concerning therapy, which he had conducted with criminal Muslims in Denmark, I knew that it would be groundbreaking. I hope that you the reader will listen closely to what he has to say. I also had the opportunity to conduct prison interviews of Muslim detainees, which were not interrogations. Minneapolis has the largest diaspora of Somali Muslims outside of Mogadishu, and there was an overload in the county jail. I was trying to decide if I wanted to draw up a research project. Pressured for time and with too many other responsibilities...

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new immune-boosting therapy for prostate cancer on Thursday, the first therapeutic vaccine for cancer ever approved by the agency. The approval opens the door to a whole new approach to cancer therapy, adding a unique weapon to the arsenal of oncologists. The vaccine, Provenge, has been shown to extend survival in patients with advanced prostate cancer by four months, more than twice as long as chemotherapy, and to increase three-year survival by 38%. A lot of people have been working in labs, biotechs and pharma companies looking for a proof of principle" that...

Well, I learned a lot from this video... We must be careful around each other. There's just no telling what we might do to cause another person distress. Funny stuff anyway, though. C

SAN DIEGO, California, March 15, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Abandoning its long-held neutrality on the marriage debate, the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) has slowly come to disavow pro-family views and sexual orientation therapy as "homophobic." Instead it now warmly supports homosexuality as a "normal and positive" variant of sexuality - all thanks to pressure by gay activists who have openly vowed to transform the organization from within. The disturbing result of the activists' tactics, says one anonymous CAMFT intern, is that pro-family therapists in California are becoming increasingly afraid to speak up in favor of natural marriage...

MERCERSBURG, Pa., March 12, 2010 – Matthew Bilancia addresses the slopes like a man on a mission, cutting and edging his snowboard down the mountain with the confidence and passion of someone who’s been doing it all his life. Army Spc. Tonya Jacobs, injured in an on-the-job accident in Kuwait in 2008, laces up her ski boots for a wounded warrior adaptive sports session March 11, 2010, at Whitetail Ski Resort in Mercersburg, Pa. The USO of Metropolitan Washington and the Two Top Mountain Adaptive Sports Foundation sponsored the event. DoD photo by Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael J. Carden  (Click...

Gordon Fleming is, by his own account, an environmentally sensitive guy. He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough. Ms. Cobb chides him for running the water too long while he shaves or showers. And she finds it “depressing,” she tells him, that he continues to buy a steady stream of items online when her aim is for them to lead a less materialistic...

An otherwise fine Washington Post column about the attempted Christmas airplane bombing and the al-Qaida ties ended with this baffling passage: One of the top leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is Said al-Shihri, 36, a Saudi national. He was captured in Pakistan in December 2001 and spent six years in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before being transferred to Saudi Arabia in November 2007. In Saudi Arabia, he entered a highly praised rehabilitation program that uses dialogue and art therapy to persuade former militants to renounce extremism. But after graduating, Shihri crossed the border into Yemen...

If there's a silver lining in the continued popularity of non-scientific healing techniques, it's the fact that the scientific community is at long last putting these so-called treatments and potions through vigorous testing. And one by one they fail to live up to their purported benefits. Here are five alternative therapies that were debunked or denounced in 2009.

US Representative Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), recently graced us with his presence on the airwaves of Northeast PA by doing a “Radio Town Hall” on WILK. Over the August recess, he has done 1 “Telephone Town Hall” in which his staff chose who asked questions, and this “Radio Town Hall”, and refuses to meet face-to-face with his constituents, as he just doesn’t have the time to do so. In discussing the recent upward revision of the projected 10 year US budget deficit from $7 Trillion to $9 Trillion, he remarked that the $2 Trillion difference “really isn’t a lot of money…”.