GordonMoyes.com

The Cancer Council NSW has had to expand its mission since the NSW Cancer Institute was set up several years ago, funded by the State government to conduct its own research and to archive the cancer registrations that are triggered by every cancer diagnosis in NSW. The Cancer Council NSW has branched out into a number of new areas including community education programs for cancer survivors and carers, granting one-off funds to help people pay their utility bills while recovering from treatment, and organising transport for people who are unable to drive to their radiotherapy or chemotherapy sessions.

Lately, I have been more aware of mounting anger, hostility and aggression in our society, especially that expressed in our shared, public spaces, but also in the emails I receive. Could the cause of so much unhappiness be the extreme level of stress and tension we all live under these days, with the declining power of the dollar, the rising food and petrol prices, the competition for entry into universities, and for jobs, where everything is happening so much faster than ever before, and common courtesy is no longer common?

After speaking in Parliament against the opening up of the restrictions on gun use, even by children as young as twelve, I voted with only four others against the Bill. Since then the gun lobby has been targeting me.

These rules are so simple you may wonder why we bother to repeat them. But we all have a tendency to be like Naaman in the Old Testament, whose story is worth telling.

Stroke is very common in Australia, but due to the difficulty in recognising it and quickly getting to the hospital, there is often a delay before treatment is started.

Many professionals feel that ADHD is not an actual diagnosis reliant upon certain conditions being met, but is a catch-all term for a range of difficult behaviours with different causes.

According to the PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome Foundation, this condition affects between 5 – 10% of women of childbearing age worldwide, and an estimated half million Australian girls and women, but most people have still never heard of it.

Over 205,000 Australian school children are smoking on a weekly basis. 24% of them are illegally supplied by tobacco retailers. Tobacco is not a matter of ‘informed adult lifestyle choice’ as misleadingly portrayed by the tobacco industry – it is in fact routinely a result of childhood recruitment and addiction. Any society worth its salt protects its children. We need to protect our children from tobacco promotion and exposure.

It has long been said that, ‘true beauty is on the inside.’ Yet more and more, we seem to be unhappy with our external appearances, some resorting to the surgeon’s knife in an attempt to change their appearance to fir their perceptions of what beauty looks like. Does cosmetic surgery truly improve body image, or is it merely patching up the outside, when the true problem lies within?

Alzheimer’s Disease is just one kind of dementia. Dementia is the term used to describe the symptoms of a large group of illnesses, which cause a progressive decline in a person’s mental functioning. It is a broad term, which describes a loss of memory, intellect, rationality, social skills and normal emotional reactions.