Your health: Find yoga videos online
For the wary beginner, yoga on the web offers full classes
Yoga's health benefits are widely extolled. But it can be awkward for a beginner to get started, especially someone wary of appearing in public in a yoga tank and leggings, The Washington Post reports.
Even experienced practitioners sometimes have problems making it to a scheduled class. One option: DoYogaWithMe.com, The Washington Post suggests.
This Canadian website, founded by yoga instructor David Procyshyn, offers hundreds of streaming videos, each about an hour long.
It also has yoga information and multiweek programs for specific audiences: beginners who want to progress to intermediate level, for example, workouts for office workers, etc.
If you're just starting, take a look at “Melt Into Gratitude,” a gentle introduction to hatha yoga, in which instructor Nicky Jones — doing slow, graceful poses in a spectacular British Columbia coastal setting — repeatedly urges you not to overstress, to do only what's comfortable. Also gentle is the pricing policy: Pay only if you want to. “Videos and programs aren't free to create,” the site says. “If you can, please make a contribution.”
Contraception caution
When her 24-year-old daughter Erika was rushed to an emergency room because of extreme shortness of breath in 2011, a doctor asked Karen Langhart, “Was your daughter using birth control?” reports a Vanity Fair article.
Told that Erika had been using a contraceptive device called NuvaRing, the doctor said, “I thought so, because she's having a pulmonary embolism.” The young woman died several days later, The Washington Post reports.
In the magazine, writer Marie Brenner describes the Langhart case as part of a highly critical story on NuvaRing, whose manufacturer, Merck, is facing thousands of lawsuits, many of them alleging that it causes potentially fatal blood clots.
Merck executives declined to be interviewed for the article, but the company provided a statement saying that “blood clots have long been known as a risk associated with combined hormonal contraceptives. … We remain confident in the safety and efficacy profile of NuvaRing.”