An Adventure in Healthy Living on the High Seas!
Greetings from Andy Weil’s Seabourn Wellness Cruise up through the Inner Passage of Alaska, where the surroundings are magnificent, the amenities luxurious, and the integrative medicine information plentiful and inspiring.
We started out in Vancouver, where we got a big picture overview of the history and philosophy of integrative medicine from Andy – a thoughtful, passionately informed eye opener for several of the guests.
Every morning there is yoga and meditation, sponsored by the ship’s spa services. An exercise room has an array of treadmills and steppers facing a vast view of the gorgeous, changing shoreline. Trust me, people, this totally beats watching the news.
Between Ketchikan and Wrangell we learned a balanced, holistic view on the integrative medicine approach to ADHD from a marvelous pediatrician, Sandy Newmark MD, clinical director of the Osher Center at UCSF. Later, he spoke wisely and beautifully about modern day stresses on children.
Victoria Maizes MD, Executive Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, spoke brilliantly and with her usual up-to-date, learned specificity about how to increase and maintain vitality; and later on about the impact of environmental toxins on health, and how to stay as green as is realistically possible.
Steve DeVries MD spoke cogently and enthusiastically about how making simple, small changes in lifestyle and diet can make enormous changes to heart health. Steve is a preventive cardiologist who is the Executive Director of the Gaples Institute for Integrative Cardiology in Chicago.
Today, having left Sitka and now taking a slow, scenic approach to Juneau, surrounded by astonishing blue ice in the water (the color it gets after all the air in it has been compressed out of it, in its previous long life as the former part of a glacier), Andy Weil will give one of his legendary healthy cooking lessons; and Jim Nicolai MD will teach us about Quick and Easy Herbs. Jim is the former medical director of Miraval Resort and now has turned his considerable talents to hospice work.
And of course, I’ve been nattering on about Guided imagery and Meditation.
The guests seem to be taking all this information in, sometimes forgoing fabulous excursions by kayak, seaplane, iron railway, catamaran and zodiac, just to learn more about integrative approaches to health.
Pretty amazing, altogether.
Take care and be well,
Belleruth
